Where the world once saw a charismatic and even unconventional pope, its latter-day view was that of a man struggling against bodily afflictions and a decline in Christianity.
When the history books are written, Karol Wojtyla’s qualities as a good shepherd and sometimes stern father are likely to be remembered best. Most of all, he was a down-to-earth figure whom Catholics throughout the world believed they knew personally.
The media irreverently dubbed him "Wojtyla Superstar" as the new pope earned sympathy and admiration in 1978 during his first weeks and months in office as Christ’s vicar in Rome.
There had never been a pope like him. "He is more beautiful than Jesus Christ," one enraptured nun is reported to have remarked after coming face to face with the Polish Holy Father.
The telegenic pope was not without vanity. As a former actor, he was adept at adopting "la bella figura" — to cut a fine figure. He could also be stubborn, seeming anything but content to slow down as an old man, refusing to cut his workload and doggedly carrying on with his travel schedule.
He took center stage as pope in the Holy Year 2000, issuing an historic apology for the proud church’s failings over two millennia and winning the hearts of Muslims and Jews during a Holy Land pilgrimage.
During his years in Rome, the "pope from far away" never forgot his Polish roots, nor his workingclass origins and the struggle by his countrymen to shake off communism.
"My experience of working life, both its positive aspects and its poverty, has influenced my entire life," he once said.
Born on May 18, 1920 as the son of a railway worker in Wadowice, south of Krakow, he lost his mother one month before his ninth birthday. A keen pupil and athlete, he began to study philosophy in 1938 after leaving school. The young Wojtyla also took acting lessons and was a founder of the Rhapsody Theater in Krakow.
The death of his father, in 1941, followed the death of his older brother and is believed to have played a decisive role in Wojtyla’s decision to become a priest.
"At 20 I had already lost all the people I loved. God was, in a way, preparing me for what would happen. After my father’s death I became aware of my true path."
Wojtyla entered a seminary in 1942, supporting himself by working in a quarry and later in a chemical factory.
After his ordination to the priesthood in 1946, he went to Rome to study. On his return to Poland in 1948, he became a student chaplain and continued his studies. Wojtyla received a doctorate in 1951, with a thesis on the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross.
He was a university lecturer in Krakow and Lublin before being made auxiliary bishop of Krakow in 1958.
He was nominated Archbishop of the Polish city in 1964 and proclaimed a cardinal by Pope Paul VI three years later. Unlike Cardinal Stefan Wsyzynski, then the primate of the Polish church, Wojtyla was seen as willing to talk with the Polish communist leadership, and he was allowed to travel widely.
Few outside Poland or the church hierarchy had heard of Cardinal Wojtyla when Paul VI’s successor, Pope John Paul I, died suddenly in 1978 after a very brief papacy. Cardinals from Germany and Austria reputedly put forward Wojtyla’s name as a candidate.
All participants in a conclave are sworn to secrecy and vote tallies are destroyed, but it has been said the archbishop of Krakow was elected with support from 90 per cent of the cardinals after eight ballots.
On October 16, 1978, Cardinal Pericle Felici emerged to tell an astonished world, in the timehonored Latin phrase: "Habemus papam Carolum Wojtyla," — We have a pope: Karol Wojtyla.
The last non-Italian to be elected to the Holy See had been a Dutchman, Hadrian VI, in 1522.
During his first public appearances John Paul II displayed an openness and physical closeness that marked him from previous popes:
he shook hands, he kissed babies and his general audiences became mass events.
His popularity with the crowds grew during his many trips abroad.
On May 13, 1981, the world was appalled when an assassin, Turkish national Mehmet Ali Agca, gravely wounded John Paul while he was saluting the faithful in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square.
Modern in form as he was, the pope was traditional in substance, taking a markedly conservative line on doctrine and morals and attempting to restore some of the former rigidity and respect for hierarchy to a church greatly changed by the Second Vatican Council.
He faced down his critics, reiterating the church’s condemnation of artificial birth control and rejecting the ordination of women.
Controversy surrounded his promotion of conservatives as bishops and his favoring of Opus Dei, a conservative lay movement.
His last published book, "Memory and Identity", raised eyebrows by drawing a comparison between the Holocaust and abortion.
Commentators often remarked on the paradox between the public adulation for John Paul as a person and the private disobedience towards his teachings by millions of Catholics, who saw no sin in sex before marriage or contraception.
In a world where millions paid no heed to religion, John Paul sought common ground with other faiths, notably with a Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi in 1986, 1993 and 2002 and courtesy visits to the Middle East.
Ecumenism made only cautious progress under John Paul: in 1999, Lutherans and Catholics agreed to a joint position on justification by faith, settling one of the main issues that split the church during the Reformation, but the pope did not attend the signing.
Friction between the Catholic and the Russian Orthodox Church grew during the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium over Russian accusations of encroachment.
The fall of communism in Europe was the overarching political event of John Paul’s tenure in the see of Peter and was partly precipitated by the success of the earlier bishop of Krakow and his fellows in creating the Solidarity revolution.
Events in the young Wojtyla’s life fused with key events of his papacy in other ways too: at the Holocaust memorial in Israel in 2000, John Paul met a Jewish woman whose life he had saved in 1945 during the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp.
Parkinson’s disease and other age-related ailments meant his health had declined dramatically in the last few years of his life and he was no longer able to walk or speak properly.
Growing calls for John Paul to retire were rebuffed, with the pope comparing the suggestion to the taunts of bystanders at the crucifixion, who said Jesus should come down from the cross.
