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Rosy-cheeked and slender, still in good shape in his mountain-hiking years, Karol Wojtyla reassured me with his smile everywhere I looked.

Poland's greatest son showed up in the predictable spots—the walls of churches and people's apartments, fake gold-embossed standards carried by priests in religious processions, graveyard candles, postal stamps, coins, and book covers. But the likeness of Pope John Paul II was just as likely to turn up on the pen I took to school, a vodka glass at a black market, a stray button in my grandma's desk drawer, coloring books for children, a rayon shawl draped around the neck of woman on a bus, and on calendars hanging in our neighborhood butcher's shop.

Before my conversion to the religion of Billy Graham—which caused my hard-partying high school friends to openly lament my "illness"—I had never been to a home that didn't display the retouched images of Poland's holy trinity. I'm talking, of course, about Mary (commonly referred to as the Queen of Poland), the fruit of her womb Jesus Christ, and a devoted follower of theirs, the pope.

I was born only four years before my great compatriot's installation as pope. His near omnipresence meant that I grew up almost oblivious to the fact that my motherland had ever existed without the son she was so proud of. We Poles went nuts over our poet-turned-pope.

And for good reasons. How could Poland have, without him, become the first Eastern European country to kick out the communists? The ultimate slayer of communism and leader of Solidarity Lech Walesa talked to me about the role John Paul II played in Europe's history in an interview for Books and Culture magazine:

After the martial law, when I told [various foreign politicians] that in Poland we had begun to overturn communism and that we would overturn it, no one believed me . … But our compatriot had become the pope [in 1978]. At that time, I had maybe 10 people per 40 million citizens in Poland who wanted to fight communism. The rest didn't believe, they didn't want to fight. Some of them were afraid, some were part of the communist system. The pope arrived in Poland [in 1979]. A year after that, I multiplied those 10 people into 10 million . … People began to believe in themselves, they stopped being afraid, and this allowed for the union we called Solidarity. If not [for] the pope—and the pope is faith—if not [for] our compatriot, we would not have accomplished this."

It was obvious the late pope had our hearts whenever he visited and we showed up by the millions. In the nation where parents don't say "I love you" to their children, we held up signs unabashedly declaring that "We love you, Holy Father" and cheered him wildly.

He, in turn, knew the power he had over us and never abused it. Instead, he used it to mitigate the nationalist tendencies of some of the narrow-minded Catholics. (Most recently, he did it to calm a separatist panic when Poland's great poet Czeslaw Milosz died.) And he gently steered us—for whom to be Polish was to be Catholic and to be Catholic was to adore Mary the Mother of God—toward a virtue that Poland upheld in 16th century Europe but had since forgotten: friendship with other Christians (more formally called ecumenism).

The pope loved the youth, and knew that their open minds and hearts were most able to welcome Christ and cross the boundaries between various Christian faiths. He encouraged the open-minded renewal youth movement called Oasis.

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49