[OnyxCougar]

John Paul acted as he thought a pastor should act, rather than according to the venerable script written by the traditional managers of popes. He invited guests to his private Mass and his meals, every day. He visited more of Italy and Rome than any of his Italian predecessors. He held seminars in his summer residence with agnostic and atheist philosophers. His world travels--wearing a tribal headdress in Kenya in 1980, holding a koala bear in Australia in 1986, gathering the largest crowd in human history in Manila in January 1995, improvising a Polish Christmas carol in New York's Central Park nine months later, solemnly commemorating the Holocaust in Jerusalem in 2000--made him the most visible pope in history.

.....

Why did the Pope remain a compelling figure for the young? One reason was his transparent integrity. Young people have acutely sensitive hypocrisy detectors; in John Paul II, they saw a man who believed what he said and acted out his beliefs. There was no "spin" here--only integrity all the way through, the integrity of a man who committed every facet of his life to Jesus Christ. This was immensely compelling.

The Pope was also attractive to the young because he defied the cultural conventions of our age and didn't pander to them. Rather, he challenged them to moral grandeur. While virtually every other authority figure in the world was lowering the bar of moral expectation, John Paul II held it high. You are capable of moral heroism, he told young people. Of course you will fail from time to time; that is human. But don't demean yourself by holding your lives to a lower standard. Get up from your failures, seek forgiveness and reconciliation, try again. That, he insisted, is the path to the fulfillment all young people seek.

And they listened. Not all of them agreed. But they came, in their millions, and listened. There is little doubt that many were changed by the encounter.

....

No Pope since the split between Rome and the Christian East in 1054 did as much to close that first massive breach in the unity of the Church. No Pope since the Reformation spent more time in dialogue with Protestant Christians. No Pope ever asked Orthodox and Protestants leaders and theologians to help him think through an exercise of the papacy that would serve their needs.

......

The dialogue with Judaism saw more concrete accomplishments. After John Paul's 1986 visit to the Synagogue of Rome, his repeated condemnations of anti-Semitism, his multiple apologies for centuries of Christian prejudice and persecution of the Jews, and his Jubilee year pilgrimage to Israel, Jews and Catholics stood on the edge of a new conversation, of a depth and range unseen for more than nineteen hundred years. Jewish leaders throughout the world have testified to the fact that John Paul II has been the best Pope for Jews ever.

.....

He was a Pope of many surprises. French journalist André Frossard understood that when, shortly after John Paul's election, he wired his French newspaper, "This is not a Pope from Poland. This is a Pope from Galilee." And that, in retrospect, was the greatest surprise of all.

source: beliefnet