Blog of Q's

… He certainly deserves an enormous amount of credit for [the end of
communism in Eastern Europe], but not in the way it’s being expressed,
particularly in the American mass media. He is only too often in my
view presented as somehow or other having colluded with the U.S., even
with the CIA, to overthrow communism. It didn’t work that way… We …
and then later Reagan promoted human rights very directly politically.
The pope did something very different, which was not political but it
had a political effect. He stripped communism of its myth of
invincibility. He demonstrated that the appearance of unanimity in
communism was a sham, that people were universally against it, and that
is what had that effect.
…
The communist writers in the city of Krakow – the communist writers —
were having a party cell meeting, and a secret police colonel was
giving an oration on subversion. And he really referred to Karol
Wojtyla …as being the source of this subversion… Before he was
pope. He wasn’t pope yet. When all of a sudden, the lady who presides
over the buffet … bursts into the courtroom and screams loudly
“Wojtyla has just been elected pope.” The colonel comes to a dead stop.
… The first party secretary was so stunned that he forgot that the
microphone was on. He turns to the second party secretary where the
colonel is silent and says to him loudly, “My God, my God, from now on
we’ll have to kiss his ass;” whereupon, the second secretary turns to
him and equally loudly says, but in a whimper, “Only… only if he lets
us.” That tells you how the communist regime felt and immediately
recognized that they were now dealing with a formidable force.
…
We just shouldn’t instrumentalize him as a politician. He was not in
the same sort of league as FDR or Churchill or Gorbachev or Reagan,
which some people have been saying. He was apart, in my judgment, above
that because he tried to deal with the totality of the human condition
and he really saw as his mission the creation of a direct bond between
humanity and divinity I think in a unique way, transdenominational. He
achieved that in a significant degree on a global scale.
…
[H]e had two gifts, one kind of fundamental and one instrumental.
Fundamental was a faith and a charisma that was really infectious. It
was very hard to understand it, but there was something about him that
was serenely confident and yet strong. Secondly, he was a very good
communicator. He was an actor at one point in his life, and he knew how
to reach out. He had an enormous impact, particularly on young people,
which I think tells you something about his magnetism. I think the
combination of the two made him a man of the time but probably a pope
for the ages.