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John Paul II wouldn't have any of that. This upset many.

Was he stubborn? Yes, he was, especially from my Protestant perspective. Why did he not permit the ordination of married men when in many parts of the world, especially France, octogenarian priests serve 20 or more altars because of the church's vocation crisis? Had he not considered the beneficial benefits of the Protestant parsonage in non-Catholic lands?

I would have had a stronger argument were it not for the snowballing divorce rates among Protestant pastors, who have frequently ceased setting shining examples to their flocks. On the other hand, Catholic seminaries in many parts of the world are filling up with a new and extraordinarily manly crop of candidates for the priesthood—manly like the pope whose example they follow.

To be a Christian doesn't mean to be cuddly. This has not been a cuddly pope, either. What he said and wrote—including 14 encyclicals filled with elegant thought and prose—has irked millions. He, who was instrumental in toppling socialism, was an inveterate preacher of justice and peace, and a harsh critic of the contemporary "Me First" variety of capitalism—but his admonitions were not rooted in Marxism-Leninism; they were based in the gospel. Thus he only did his job as supreme pontiff. And thus his warnings hit home.

Yes, my pope sometimes seemed harsh. It shocked many of his Protestant admirers that in his superbly scripted encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (Church of the Eucharist) he categorically ruled out altar fellowship between the Roman Catholics and us. But then, did he not have a point when he said this fellowship should come at the end of the ecumenical process—as its crowning moment?

As one whose own denominations ranks Word and Sacrament as equal pillars on which the church rests, I have never understood the fashionable thoughtlessness with which so often the wafers are chewed and the wine (or grape juice) is drunk, each communicant interpreting this sacramental act in his individual—meaning postmodern—way.

I for one was grateful to John Paul II for standing up against this aberration, even if this offended those of us yearning for Christian unity.

Toward the end of his pontificate, my pope's critics, including cardinals, were increasingly shaking their heads at his stubbornness. Why would he not step down, considering that his body no longer accommodated his mind? His face looked puffed up, shook uncontrollably, saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth. Often he could not finish a sentence.

Well now, Stephen Hawking, the cosmologist, can't speak at all anymore, and nobody suggests that he should stop entrusting his important thoughts by arduous means to his computer. And John Paul II, whose mind was as clear as ever until the end, has had an additional mission Hawking does not have. It's called discipleship.

"Christ did not come down from the cross either," the pope kept saying—and did something utterly counter-cultural in an era when husbands and wives all too often find it impossible to live out their commitments beyond their first marital squabble: He bore his cross, for all to see, especially the young who came to surround this severely handicapped old man by the hundreds of thousands wherever they could, filled with immense affection and admiration.

John Paul II represented to them the opposite of the wishy-washy perversions of postmodernity with its ever-shifting "truth" claims. He was, if you pardon this very Protestant remark, the "Here I stand" kind of a guy we needed as much as ever in the church. That's why he has made disciples of millions of young people around the globe.

That's why he was my pope—and why I didn't have to be a Roman Catholic to claim him as mine.

Uwe Siemon-Netto is a Lutheran theologian and religion editor for UPI.

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49