Legacy of unity comes at a high price

However you gauge it, the reign of John Paul II has been a pontificate on the grand scale. Inaugurated in 1978, it is the third longest in the 2,000-year history of the papacy. Karol Wojtyla became the first non-Italian to take up the crook of St Peter in more than 450 years and his nationality has proved crucially important in the years following his election.

The very fact that he is a Polish pope helped to destabilise communism in his native country and the rest of central and eastern Europe. As official documents for the period become available, his role in ending the divisions of the cold war may be shown to have been more than just inspirational. Claims have been made, though never proved, that he facilitated the channelling of funds to Solidarity, and that this helps to explain at least some of the murky dealings in which the Vatican bank was found to be immersed soon afterwards.

Within days of his arrival in the Apostolic Palace, he had injected a degree of informality into the business of being pope that will be difficult for any successor to reverse.

"Suddenly, we had a pope who swam in a pool and went to the mountains to ski; a pope who talked to reporters on his plane, kissed children on the forehead and patted visitors on the arm," said Luigi Accattoli, the veteran Vatican-watcher of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

Even when fit and able, John Paul was not a prodigious writer of encyclicals, the didactic texts with Latin titles whose production was traditionally regarded as the true work of a pontiff. He wrote only 14, though the intellectual calibre of those he did produce was high; what he was after were more contemporary ways of communicating with his flock.

"The church always had a certain fear of the future," said Monsignor José Luís Illanes, a member of the Opus Dei fellowship and professor of theology at the University of Navarre. "John Paul did not. One of his most important legacies is to leave behind a church without fear of modernity."

Karol Wojtyla is the first pontiff to publish a book - Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which was a global bestseller - and the first to see a play staged and movies produced using scripts he had written.

Above all, though, he exploited to the full the possibilities offered by jet travel to speak to the faithful in person. He made papal visits a central - often, it seemed, the central - part of his mission.

The image of a sprightly, white-robed pontiff descending the steps of an airliner to kiss the runway became a television news cliche of the 1980s. He travelled to more than 100 countries, flying the equivalent of almost 30 times round the world.

The actor (and linguist) in him thrilled to the idea of mass rallies. He arranged for them to be staged on a scale that none of the totalitarian states of the 20th century had achieved. In Manila in 1995, he drew a crowd of between 3 million and 4 million, possibly the largest human assembly in history.

Often, along with the visits and rallies, came the canonisations and beatifications. Pope John Paul II declared more people saintly and holy than all of his predecessors combined. He took a process that had seemed archaic, if not actually discredited, and used it in a way that was thoroughly original and modern, not as a sort of posthumous honours system but as a means of communication.

The evidence of sainthood or holiness was sometimes tendentious and, on occasions, the process was accelerated to unprecedented speeds to meet an artificial deadline, often a papal visit to the place of origin of the person to be commemorated. But then the point was not so much to honour the memory of the deceased as to send a message to the living. It could be a recognition of the loyalty to the faith of some country or community. Or it could be an indication of values the Pope held dear.

Whether, however, his chosen methods of communication will survive his imminent death is open to question.

"I think, for example, that papal travels will not be a necessary part of a future papacy," said Michael Walsh, his biographer. He argues that Karol Wojtyla's journeys were carried out for a specific purpose that was not generally recognised and which the next pope may not share. It was "to reassert the authority of Rome over what [the late British journalist and author] Peter Hebblethwaite called 'the runaway church'".

For many years after the close in 1965 of the Second Vatican Council, it seemed as though anything might be possible in the Roman Catholic world: an end to priestly celibacy, a change in the teaching on birth control, union with the Anglicans, and perhaps, in the very long term, women's ordination.

Then came the election of John Paul II.

In Gerard O'Connell's book, God's Invisible Hand, Cardinal Francis Arinze, the Nigerian whom many have tipped as a possible successor, recalled his reaction in 1978 to the news that Karol Wojtyla had been chosen.

"Ah. We're going to have some order in the church," he told a priest he was visiting. "People are going to know where they stand."

Though he helped to destroy a totalitarian regime, Karol Wojtyla is an authoritarian and disciplinarian at heart; the true son of a widowed army officer. The shortage of female influence in his childhood has been used to explain his devotion to the Virgin Mary. It may also have lain behind his stereotypically male respect for order and hierarchy.

Moreover, as Michael Walsh notes, the Pope's enthusiasm for modernity has been far from comprehensive. "There were a lot of things he didn't like - fairly basic things, like democracy. He more or less said it in [the 1995 encyclical] Evangelium Vitae: democracy is fine so long as people think the right thoughts."

From the outset, the Pope has had no truck with the notion of "collegiality" - the idea that local churches should have the freedom to worship in ways that made sense in local contexts. That has left a legacy of simmering, though usually well-disguised, resentment among bishops in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

On the issues where liberal Catholics in western Europe and North America had hoped for movement, John Paul was unbending: no to married priests (even though he was happy to welcome married former Anglican vicars); a stance on birth control so rigid it saw the Holy See link up with the Iran of the ayatollahs at the UN's 1994 conference on population and development in Cairo, and a statement the same year on women's ordination that ruled it out even as an issue for discussion.

The immobility of the Vatican under John Paul II helps to explain an apparent paradox of his papacy. On the one hand, he reached out with ease and success to other religions. In 1986 he persuaded representatives of all the world's main faiths to join him in Assisi to pray for peace. In 2002-03, his determined opposition to war in Iraq helped to allay fears in the Muslim world of a Christian "crusade", and may yet prove to have been his most enduring contribution to world peace.

Yet the same man has encountered immense difficulty in finding common ground with other Christian denominations. Unity with the Anglicans became a pipe-dream after the Church of England began ordaining women, and tensions with the Orthodox churches have run high throughout his papacy.

This was partly because, whereas there was never any question of Christianity linking up with, say, Islam, and therefore no need for compromises by either side, ecumenism required concessions that were unthinkable to the Pope.

Linda Pieccynski, a spokeswoman for the US-based Call to Action, the world's largest lobby group for reform in the Catholic Church, said: "He has been a model of what it means to proclaim to the world the messages of peace, social justice, religious freedom and solidarity with the poor. Yet he has consolidated power in the Vatican and created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, particularly among theologians and liberal Catholics who would have liked freer discussion, particularly on issues of human sexuality."

Like many critics of the Pope, she argues that many of those issues "do not have to do with church doctrine itself". But that view became more difficult to sustain as the reign of John Paul II wore on. In his writings he has increasingly depicted humanity as dependent on the outcome of a mighty struggle: on the one hand, there was a "culture of death" that tolerated abortion, promoted contraception and abandoned millions of fertilised eggs as part of in-vitro fertilisation and embryological experimentation; on the other, the Catholic Church and its "theology of life".

His unwavering orthodoxy has come with a high price. During his papacy an estimated 100,000 priests have left the Roman Catholic priesthood, most unable to reconcile themselves to the insistence on celibacy.

Claims have been made of an indirect link between the exodus of so many heterosexual clerics in the early years of John Paul II's papacy and the deluge of homosexual paedophilia accusations that has rocked the church in recent years.

Among the laity, meanwhile, there was what Thomas Arens, a spokesman for the German branch of the lay movement, We Are Church, calls "a quiet process of people simply turning away". How many would have stayed had there been a pope in the mould of John XXIII, the "father" of the Second Vatican Council, is impossible to say.

Certainly, secularisation has taken a toll on churches everywhere. But it is nevertheless true that millions of Catholics stopped attending mass during the reign of John Paul II and that, in many cases, it was because they were unable to square their lives with his teaching, particularly on contraception.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the church's southern European heartland, which now has the lowest birth rates in the world. Even in Italy, active Catholics are now a minority of the population.

Not surprisingly, John Paul II has been accused by critics of creating division. But the effect of the division has been to leave a church which, in the developed world at least, is considerably more compact and like-minded than when he came into office. What remains to be seen is whether it has become so compact and like-minded as to be resistant to change.

All but a handful of the cardinals who will no doubt shortly choose his successor were appointed by the Pope during his long reign and, out in the church at large, active Roman Catholics who do not share Karol Wojtyla's stern, bleak vision of the world are fast becoming an endangered species.