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Biographers often recounted the story of a young boy in Rome who once asked the pope why he traveled so much. "Because the world is not here!," the pope replied. "Have you heard what Jesus said? Go and evangelize the whole world. And so I go to the whole world."

The globalized papacy that John Paul leaves behind is coupled with the activist role he played on the international stage, particularly his skillful use of the papacy as a bully pulpit to challenge — and outlive — communism.

His election in 1978 came months before the Solidarity movement in his native Poland confronted the country's communist regime, setting in motion a decade of challenges that would — with the pope's moral and financial support — eventually see the Iron Curtain collapse from within.

His appearances in Poland during the first year of his papacy electrified millions of Poles, to the discomfort of party bosses who dared not bar his entry to the country. Along with President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, John Paul emerged as a global leader willing to vigorously challenge communism.

"He certainly didn't do it by himself," said the Rev. Tom Reese, editor of the Jesuit weekly America. "But he was the right man, at the right place, at the right time to be the catalyst to make that happen."

John Paul also did not hesitate to open the doors of the Vatican to the leader of the officially atheist Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. "Without this pope, it would be impossible to understand what happened in Europe at the end of the 1980s," Gorbachev said.

Yet interwoven with John Paul's global legacy was a central theme of what he called "the culture of life," a responsible use of political and economic freedoms to promote human dignity. At the same time, he condemned what he saw as "the culture of death" marked by abortion, euthanasia, totalitarianism and an unrestrained consumerism. It was an agenda that left him unbeholden to the political left or the right.

In a larger sense, John Paul saw humanity imperiled by twin threats — the economic brutality of globalization and runaway capitalism, and old-fashioned political tyranny, which trampled individual dignity and freedom. He worried about both when he described the state of man in 1991: "At times it seems as though he exists only as a producer and consumer of goods, or as an object of state administration," he said.

Still, he will be remembered less for humbling the mighty than for lifting up the young, the poor, the sick and the disabled. He was happiest when surrounded by hundreds of thousands of young pilgrims at World Youth Days or in moments such as a visit to Los Angeles in 1987 when he startled security guards by climbing over barricades to embrace and bless with a kiss a young man with no hands playing the guitar with his feet.

Tony Melendez, who was turned down for the seminary because he did not have a thumb or a forefinger with which to hold the Eucharist, later would say from the moment the pope embraced him, "it was for this that I was born. It was for this that I came into the world."

Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920, to a devout Catholic family in the industrial town of Wadowice, Poland, near Krakow. His father, also Karol Wojtyla, was an army officer and his mother, Emilia, a schoolteacher.

"She wanted two sons, one a doctor and the other a priest," the pontiff told French writer Andre Frossard about his mother. "My brother was a doctor and, in spite of everything, I became a priest."

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49