The 'indispensable' holy man who helped end the Cold War

National Post, 15 May 2020

Shortly after Pope John Paul II's death in 2005, Henry Kissinger told NBC News that no one had a greater impact on the 20th century.

A noteworthy element in the recent 75th anniversary celebrations of VE-Day was the prominence, ubiquitously granted, to Winston Churchill. The two indispensable countries to the defeat of Nazi Germany were the Soviet Union and the United States, not Great Britain. But Churchill was the indispensable man, not because of the armies he commanded, but because of the souls he stirred. His power was the moral force to which he gave expression with unique rhetorical brilliance.

That comes to mind as the Catholic world — and beyond — marks the centennial of the birth of Karol Wojtyła, St. John Paul II, this Monday, May 18. For John Paul was the indispensable man for the end of the Cold War, the peaceful defeat of communism and the dismantling of the Soviet empire in both its external and internal components.

Shortly after the pope’s death in 2005, Henry Kissinger told NBC News that no one had a greater impact on the 20th century. That assessment is surprising coming from the master of  realpolitik, who might have been thought sympathetic to Stalin’s dismissive question: “How many divisions has the pope?”

Kissinger had no religious or philosophical solidarity with the Christian humanism of Wojtyła — John Paul. But he knew that there were forces in history that a true practitioner of realpolitik ought to recognize.

What was more real? Where did power reside?

In Stalin’s demand to be recognized as slavemaster over half of Europe at Yalta? Or in the fearless proclamation by John Paul in Warsaw in June 1979 that “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography; the exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man.”

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