Tireless thinker who offered world's masses love and hope

EACH morning, when his health allowed him, Pope John Paul II would wake to watch the dawn. "I like to watch the sun rise," he told friends. This week, as night prepared to envelop him and his 26-year pontificate, it was worth recalling that he saw his role, like that of the sun, as "a witness to hope".

On 16 October 1979 when, at the age of 58, he stepped on to the balcony of St Peter’s Square dressed in the white papal robes and wearing the fisherman’s ring, the first words he uttered were: "Be not afraid". The message he has preached across 100 countries and to billions of people has been one of love and hope - even if, on occasion, it felt like the hectoring of an impatient father.

In the years to come his legacy will be dissected. Yet today, say Catholic observers, it is important to remember that he believes his mission is for the good of all mankind, not just the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics.

When previous cardinals were elected as Pope, some were deeply shaken while others wept tears of fright. When Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected on the second day of voting, his confidence was unshakeable.

For the first 13 years of his papacy, he trained his voice and position against communism. In an earlier era, Stalin said mockingly: "How many battalions has the Pope?" Pope John Paul II revealed that he needed none - just faith, a public platform and the assistance of America. Together, they helped bring the Berlin wall tumbling down.

One of the first countries he visited after his election was Poland. His visit lasted nine cathartic days and set off sparks that helped to establish Solidarity, the first independent labour movement in the Soviet Bloc. After the collapse of communism in 1991, his next battle was against what he described as "the culture of death" - abortion, euthanasia and the disregard of the poor and sick.

While there may have been many over the past decade who wished that the Pope would retire, or shuffle off and spare the world the torturous sight of his gasping attempts to speak or move, he saw this as his final mission.

He believed a Pope who was once admired for his athleticism - he skied during the first few years of the papacy - should bear witness to the world of the aged.

He believed he should show that the elderly and the infirm should not be ushered out of sight or prematurely discharged from this world into the next.

Yet for a man who in his youth was a powerful actor, these last years have been his most difficult role.

Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920 in Wadowice near Krakw, Poland, to Karol Wojtyla and Emilia Kaczorowska. He displayed a fierce intelligence which was combined with a deep piety learned at his mother’s knee. Her death, and shortly afterwards that of his brother, turned him into a serious and determined young man. During the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War, he ignored the pleas of friends to join the resistance and instead dedicated himself to prayer. By day, he toiled as a labourer in a rock quarry in Krakw. By night, he studied clandestinely for the priesthood in an underground seminary.

The young man’s life in the church began with his ordination in 1946.

In his early years, he enjoyed a twin role as professor and priest and taught at the Catholic University in Lublin. Yet his ascension in the Polish church was assured.

In 1958, he was made bishop and six years later was promoted to Archbishop of Krakow. The following year in 1965, he delivered a famous letter of reconciliation from the Polish bishops to their counterparts in Germany. It began: "We forgive and ask forgiveness".

In 1967, he was consecrated a cardinal in the Sistine Chapel by Pope Paul VI. During the course of the next 11 years, the reputation of this deep thinker from Poland would grow around the Catholic world.

Yet the outside world only came to know him on that fateful day in October 1978. At the time, Catholics were still reeling from the sudden death, after just 33 days as Pope, of John Paul I.

His successor was quick to make his mark. As the first non-Italian Pope since 1523 - when a Dutchman, Hadrian VI, took the role - the new Pope was quick to delight his new countrymen when he asked them, from the papal balcony, to correct him if his Italian was ever wrong.

Where previous popes became prisoners of the Vatican, seldom seen outside its walls, this new Polish Pope wished to roam the world and preach to all its citizens. The image of him stepping off a plane in each new land and kneeling to kiss the tarmac - as he did to the delight of many Scots in 1982 - made him new friends and powerful enemies.

In 1981, in St Peter’s Square, a young Turk, Mehmet Al Agca, shot him in the abdomen, leaving him hospitalised for 20 days. The Pope later visited Agca in prison and forgave him.

The public image of Pope John Paul II may have been as a kindly man of God, yet within the church he had an iron will and fought successfully against liberation theology, a political philosophy popular among South American priests, and against those who wished to see the ordination of women.

He also, more than any other Pope, asked for forgiveness from others: from Jews, from Muslims and anyone the Catholic church had mistreated down through the centuries.

In many ways, the papacy of John Paul II was one of firsts. In 1986 he became the first Pope to visit a synagogue. In 1989, he had the first meeting with a Kremlin chief when he saw Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2001, he was the first Pope to enter a mosque. He was also the first Pope to unite the world’s religions in a day of prayer in Italy.

Yet the last decade has been one of slow and steady decline as Parkinson’s disease turned his warm smile into a frightful scowl. He has endured a litany of other health problems including surgery to remove a benign intestinal tumour and, later, in 1994, to replace a hip.

Many believed he would not survive the year 2000, during which he made a special pilgrimage to Bethlehem, the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem, the Jordan River and Nazareth.

After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Pope tried to prevent further bloodshed by urging America to show restraint but his attempts to prevent the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq were fruitless. The years that followed were also stained by what he described as the "grave scandal" of abusive priests in America, and elsewhere in the world.

In February, he was rushed to hospital with complications brought on by flu and never fully recovered. Last week, a close aide explained that the Pope had put himself in God’s hands. Last night, God was preparing to take Pope John Paul II home.