His vocation seems to have happened some time around the death of his father; when they were living together in a basement apartment in Krakow in the middle of the war. He'd already lost his mother and his older brother. They were very poor and he was witnessing the Holocaust. He was witnessing the occupation of his university city. He had had his delightful first year at college ruined because suddenly the Nazis came in and took away his friends and his professors to concentration camps. He'd had to virtually go into hiding, he had to work as a forced laborer.

And in the midst of all of this horror, having learned the bad news about the human race so early, he's then faced with the death of his last close relative. That seems to be the defining moment: when he decided for the priesthood. He had an intimate understanding somehow of this religion as something that was most pertinent and most relevant to what he was experiencing: the dismantling of his culture, and his friends, and his world...I often think that, in a way that is perhaps not familiar to Americans, this Pope must have had an understanding of his religion that was very immediate to him because in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, and around Nazareth, there was this occupying army and all of this brutality of a foreign power. That's exactly what Karol Wojtyla was experiencing in his early 20's. So he must have seen the immediacy of his religion to this situation.

I think one of the first things that began to show Karol Wojtyla what the ultimate political power of a priest might be was this experience he had with Jan Tyranowski, this strange figure who was a tailor, a slight figure with a high-pitched voice, as we read, but who began to gather a few people into what he called his "living rosary," boys, young men, who would come together. He would teach them about the Catholic faith and about the possibility of inner liberation from the faith, and transformation. And long before Karol Wojtyla was ever thinking of the geopolitical influence he was going to be having on the world stage, he was experiencing in a small group here, the possibility of bringing people together, of changing them, of giving them a sense of unity within their faith.

Karol Wojtyla became interested in this fellow. We'll never know exactly what the basis of that was, but I've always suspected that what intrigued Wojtyla was the realization that you could begin to change a person from within by teaching, quietly teaching and encouraging faith. Transforming the personality from within.

Ultimately of course this had enormous political overtones when we see him doing something on a much larger scale; first as bishop and cardinal in Poland, working under the mentorship of Wyszinski, and then ultimately when he became Pope. And he just continued to apply the same philosophy, that it's possible to liberate people by making them aware of their common faith...One of the most politically influential things he did as Pope was begin to preach right after he was elected about the common faith of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals. Some of his critics called it his "Christendom religion." But it was in effect the same sort of thing he'd been doing with that first little group, the living rosary, with Jan Tyranowski. He was saying there is a common faith that we have, it can transform our lives, it can make us authentic liberated people from within, that's the meaning of this Christian faith he would say. And so he began to experience that seeing what a priest could do to influence people in this way, giving them a sense of themselves, a sense, if you will, of solidarity, as a religiously identifiable group, first in the little rosary group, then in Poland as a priest, as a bishop, then in Krakow as the cardinal, ultimately as the Pope.

I see something here that ultimately was played out on a geopolitical level on the world stage. Because when you look at the way in which Pope Wojtyla urged Walesa to go slowly, not too quickly, once Solidarity had been formed, so as not to give the Soviets an excuse to move too fast, too far, you can see that what John Paul II was trying to do, was transform the personality of Moscow itself.

And in fact, in articles after the fall of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev has written that the approach of John Paul II, as Gorbachev said, made a new kind of thinking possible for us all. I think what we have here is a man who, from the very beginning, had seen that if you teach it correctly, if you witness it correctly, and encourage people correctly, with his particular faith, you have the possibility of transforming personality from within, of changing it.

John Paul would start these groups--kayaking, mountain climbing, discussion groups. And while these were extensively spiritual and sub-social gatherings, they were also kind of breeding grounds of future leaders of Solidarity. Can you expand on that?

Covering the Pope, I constantly became impressed by the way in which for him there really doesn't seem to be a difference between the spiritual and, if you will, the political. They're virtually the same thing for him. These little groups of people who had become his close friends, he would talk with them about their life, their loves, he would marry them and baptize...their children when they got married. He was also at the same time giving them a sense of self-confidence and liberation. The idea of liberation and his faith...are completely the same. He's always talking to people about their authenticity as people. One of his first books is called The Acting Person--he concentrates on personality and authenticity, very important concepts for him. And you can see that from the beginning he's always looking at the possibility of creating groups of people who individually he has taught how to become free as he sees it. By having a strong faith.

His sense of his religion, as I understand it, is always within a political context. It had to be, of course, because of the realities of Poland. He understood that these were the same realities that existed 2000 years ago around Jerusalem, that that's the idea, as he understands it, of what Jesus is all about. It is about being, to use the words he would use, "honest with God, honest with yourself, honest with your conscience." So that you have an inner strength. Now, of course, the political effect of that was that he was continually helping to create self-confidence in the people in Poland who knew that they were occupied from a foreign power but wanted to maintain their sense of their own identity. Now this is an ancient Polish tradition in the Church because there is a long line, for a thousand years, of bishops, saints, and martyrs who are understood in Poland to be the saviors of the Polish nation. He always sees himself very much as part of that tradition, of being someone who stands for Poland's identity.

Give us a sense what it was like to live in the Soviet-occupied Poland of the 1960s, when these groups were considered anti-state. Why were these groups important?

Of course I wasn't there, but we've been reading about and hearing about it ever since he became Pope and had to get to know what this guy was all about. And Wojtyla didn't invent it, it was something that developed under the protection of the Cardinal Primate Wyszinski.

One of the ironic keys is that the Communists denied the Church access to the media, and so the Church leaders had to go out, personally, among the people, to build their base. They couldn't get on the television, the couldn't rely on these modern techniques that many other religious leaders think can get them a larger following. So they had to go out among people. So it was a natural kind of nursery for priests and bishops who might have a particular skill at this. That's what Wojtyla developed. He was handsome, he was charismatic, he was self confident, he knew he had a good thing having come from such poverty-stricken beginnings. He was now a very respected person with a lively mind. He had all of the gifts that could really flourish in a situation where they were denied access to a lot of media. So, within the general allegiance that Wyszinski wanted to make sure the Poles had to the Church, not to the Communist Party, and not to Moscow-- Wojtyla would be a natural star.

And so, he was encouraged to continue to build groups among his parishioners, among his friends. And because of his experience from the very beginning of working first with small groups of young men and then with families, he continually developed that muscle through practice, of building immediate community feeling, independence and liberation among them, if you will. They belonged to the Church; they saw the Church as the means--as Wyszinski made sure everybody would in Poland--of liberation, not the Communist Party. Wyszinski's main trick, if you will, in the 1930's was to begin to develop a kind of theology that said Christ will be for the oppressed and for the poor, and for those who are needy, not Marx. This was absolutely key in Wyszinski's mind to helping keep the allegiance of both the intelligentsia and the worker class, if you will, in Poland. And it's because Poland remained so socially cohesive that way, under the Church, that the Communists had to deal through them.

He encouraged, therefore, anything--such as the actions of this charismatic young priest and bishop Wojtyla--which would get this personal allegiance going, this community feeling. I think the fact that they didn't have access to the media turned out ultimately, ironically, to be a great advantage to them, and part of what helped overthrow the Communist Party in the end.

Talk to me about Nowa Huta and bishop Karol Wojtyla's goal in making that a reality. Some people call this a true training ground for the young Wojtyla in working with the Communist authorities in getting what he wanted--which was an extraordinary church.

The bishop wanted a new church. The Communists said, "Well, you can't have one." The bishop wanted a new church right in town. And the Communists said, "Well, you can't have one, this is for the workers, they have other concerns." Bishop Wojtyla kept pushing, kept working with them. He developed a kind of pragmatism with the Communists during that entire campaign to get Nowa Huta built. He...didn't get stubborn at any point. Because he knew what he wanted was transformation even within the authorities. At one point, the authorities said, "You can't have it here, you have to have it out here on the edge of town." So he said, "Fine, we'll do that."

He kept trying to call their bluff to find ways to work with them to keep the dialogue going. He developed obvious talent, therefore, subtle adaptation to his adversary, if you will. It was a kind of demonstration that he didn't want to go the guerrilla route, to make things polarized, to bring on violence of any kind, to bring on an impasse. He wanted to keep working, as he would see it, in a Christian way with his enemy.

He tries, I think, throughout his life and throughout his administration in Poland, to apply that rule: love your enemy. He keeps trying very subtle ways of doing that. And I think that in the way that he finally got Nowa Huta built, by constantly keeping at it, by getting local support from people, by having marches through the street, by raising a penny here, a penny there from everybody, he just outlasted the Communists finally. And this kind of demonstration of will, of patience, and of a desire to be accommodating wherever he can, is what he ultimately developed and I think we saw him using after he became Pope in helping Solidarity ultimately reach a successful end.

Let's talk about his first trip back to Poland.

That first trip back to Poland, he pierced the Iron Curtain, and you could tell it right there. These enormous crowds that came out. The very first crowd, we came in from the airport in the capital city, there was this enormous silent crowd stretching out through the square there in Warsaw and out onto the side streets. I remember the silence as we came in. They were looking, they couldn't believe, they'd heard through television and everything that a Pole was now the Pope, and here he was back with them. We'd already been with the Pope to Mexico, and we'd seen these enormous jubilant crowds. We knew he had this kind of charisma with crowds and so we were sort of expecting something here, a jubilant return. But that wasn't the first reaction. It was much more serious and grim and somber.

And he came into town, and the Poles were standing there and looking at him. And they were very quiet. And he got up there and gave that first powerful sermon, right there in the middle of Warsaw. Little by little, over the next two or three days, the Poles discovered it's all right to cheer for him. It's all right to cheer; we're not going to get mowed down if we cheer for him. And that's the moment in my mind of real transformation. It's when those crowds saw themselves as being a power that could not be denied. He brought them all out but they then looked around and saw themselves. He provided a lot of the intellectual leadership for it. And spoke fearlessly about what was wanted. But they suddenly felt themselves becoming a cohesive polity that could have an impact and be a force, and needn't live in any kind of fear in front of the authorities. That was what was so remarkable.

By about the third day of that first trip, the cheering was much more spontaneous and it began to break out everywhere. Because the Poles themselves had begun to understand with this organization, through him and through all of our national self-respect, that we can demonstrate in front of all these cameras from around the world that are here, we are free. In their spirit, already they were. It was an astonishing event in that way, politically, because we journalists and our editors around the world didn't know exactly where this was going but we knew it was new. We knew this was a major story, and that the Communist leaders in Moscow must be wondering--"What in heaven's name are we going to do about this?"

Ten years later, the wall fell.

One of the political dynamics that is set loose whenever the Pope goes on a trip, and especially on those trips back to his native Poland as Pope, is that he is demonstrating to his divisions--that is, his priests and bishops who live there--how they can act because he is their role model if anybody is. If he comes in and gathers a crowd, then speaks openly about the need for freedom and human rights, I think the first, most immediate, effect that ultimately leads to real political change on these trips, and it happened in other countries too, in other dictatorships with this Pope, is that he is showing those priest and bishops who are there--"After I leave, you can behave like this too. We're all part of the same Church, the same organization."

And ultimately, what happened of course with his first two trips to Poland is that he created Solidarity. He lit the spark that became a cohesive political force. Whenever he would leave, the organization he left behind was working furiously to get leaflets out, to get organizations going. Solidarity blossomed after that first trip. The Poles had felt themselves as a national unit. They saw those crowds, they saw each other, they saw themselves in those crowds, and they knew that they now had power. And when the Pope left, the priests and bishops who could now imitate him, knew how to continue organizing them. So they could keep the pressure on. And that's the thing this Pope did. He managed to lead them in keeping the pressure on. Sometimes stopping a little bit, sometimes pushing very slowly, but never pullingback.

And after 10 years, ultimately, that pressure led to a change in thinking and a change of tactic in Moscow itself and the Communist Party had to ask Solidarity for negotiations. Ultimately, the wall fell in Berlin, but it was because of this patient building of a political force through the unifying nature of his religion that the Pope was able to get this all started, make it happen.

When the Pope first came in as Pope to Warsaw and into Victory Square, to that first crowd that was standing there in silent awe, not knowing if it was going to be safe for them to cheer even yet. And then heard this forceful speech in which he stood there and they knew it was in front of the cameras from around the world, because they could see all the cameras there, and said to them, "be not afraid," "you have rights" in effect he was saying, don't worry, you have a right to fight for this. You could, you could see the beginning of really essential encouragement for what, 10 years later, was profound change.

Are there any other phrases that strike you from his speeches?

His remarkable first trip to Poland of course had many important speeches in which he used phrases like "be not afraid," and the word freedom several times, and talking about rights and human rights. That was absolutely critical, a necessary part of what was to happen. But the image that I have in my mind is, in the midst of these astonishing crowds that turned out everywhere, that nobody could really comprehend at first, is this image of the Pope traveling through all those crowds in his Popemobile, and always standing right next to him, this, this gaunt figure, who was really unknown to those of us who'd never covered Poland before, this dignified, quiet, tall, slender, elderly man, always standing next to him. And after the first few days of getting over the immediate hoopla of all of this event, we began to wonder among the journalists, who is that guy? And we learned of course that this was the Cardinal Primate of Poland, Stefan Wyszinski. And he was always there.

And I came to understand afterwards that what was happening was Wyszinski--who knew that he was near the end of his life, who had fought a very tough battle with the Communists for 30 years and more, who had managed to keep the allegiance of the Polish people cohesive, so that the Soviets had to deal through him, in effect for crowd control--this man now knew that he was about to die. He was near the end of his life, and he'd suddenly been given an answer to his biggest worry: "what will happen after I go? I have held this Church and this nation together." Suddenly, his protégé becomes the Pope and comes back.

So this image of Wyszinski moving around, always next to the new Pope, he's in effect saying to the Poles: here's the man that'll take you to the next stage. I've taken you through 30 years, we know that among the satellite countries around Moscow, we have relatively more freedom than anybody else because we've held together, I'll be leaving soon, now you've got the Pope himself, and he's Polish, and he will take you to this next stage of fighting to recover Polish independence. As it had happened in centuries before from other martyr-bishops, and other religious leaders who have always been the center of holding together Polish nationalism and independence. That's the most powerful image I have really from those trips, aside from the crowds, the silent figure always moving around with him.

In light of that, describe for me the powerful image of these two men.

Well, we know that after Wojtyla became Pope, the first big audience he held was with all of the Poles who were in Rome. And there was so much excitement that very few cameras were there. But there were one or two that caught this scene, where, in front of all of the Poles who were visiting Rome, Cardinal Wyszinski went up on the stage there in the audience hall to try and kneel down in front of Karol Wojtyla and the new pope wouldn't have it. He said, "no, no, no, no," picked him right up and they suddenly embraced and dissolved in tears. And the whole room dissolved in tears because they knew there was this astonishing success, this culmination of dreams of Polish self respect and desires for independence.

Rome had been the place that Wojtyla had first come himself, immediately after the Nazi occupation, to experience what freedom could be like. Two years as a young seminarian in 1946 he came there. Rome was this place which for Poles could be the place to see that liberation and independence is possible. And here they all were together, the new Pope--the first non-Italian in 455 years--was Polish. Their Primate Cardinal who had led them so far through 30 years under the Communists was there in front of them, and there they were in this city which, to them, symbolizes freedom. And they saw the young student, the young protégé, refusing, on this very human ground, even though it was proper for him now to kneel in front of the Pope, just refusing, he said, "No, no." Flesh and blood comes first. Picked him up and they embraced. I mean history sometimes doesn't need any words at all.

Can you briefly describe the scene of marshal law--the man in white meets the man in dark glasses.

Cardinal Wyszinski gets cancer. He's dying. Solidarity has been born and created. It's a vibrant and dangerous animal in Poland, and Moscow know it, and the world knows it. And it's being run spiritually from the Vatican. And the world knows it. I mean, after he became Pope, we know that suddenly there was great increase in Radio Vatican Polish broadcasts. Everybody was wondering how is this new Polish pope advising Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement? It's getting dangerous to Moscow, there's a lot of disturbance there, there could be martial law that comes in, what's he going to do? What's the Pope going to do...to guide this?

And then in the midst of that, suddenly, the Pope gets assassinated. He should have died, it went right through him. Miraculously, it didn't kill him. There's a very critical moment here for the political outcome. When, on a Wednesday afternoon the Pope is shot, he goes into the hospital, nearly dies, they couldn't get the ambulance started for five minutes and he...almost bled to death by the time he got there, and for the next four days we began to realize in Poland where things are getting very dangerous, the man who's held Poland together, Cardinal Primate Wyszinski, is dying of cancer. The other moral authority in Poland happens to be the Pope--and he seems to be on the edge of death as well. They're saying he's going to get better, but is he?

So the Pope struggled to make sure that four days later at his regular Sunday Angelus--everyday at noon he appears at his window and speaks-- he made sure that his voice would be heard. We all gathered there in the square and over the loudspeakers that they had arranged on a direct line from his hospital, we heard this groggy voice of the Pope giving his regular Sunday blessing. And I remember standing there and listening to it and thinking, 'he's got a strong will, he's going to come out of this,' and realizing, however, that perhaps utmost in the Pope's mind was wanting to make sure that Solidarity and that the people in Poland could hear the voice, and know that he was alive, and know that he was going to make it.

Because he knew that he was the moral authority in a way that controlled the Solidarity movement, that kept insisting it remain non-violent. He knew that if it did not remain non-violent it would give the Communists in Moscow an excuse to take over and to come in with martial law. So it was absolutely critical to John Paul, I believe, that he let them know as soon as he could, "I'm still here. Your moral authority is still here. The guy that is telling you, we've got to remain non-violent, is still here and I'm coming back."

Now, the next image I have in my mind after that, looking back on it all, is one that we were told about. It's the last conversation between Wojtyla and Wyszinski. I believe that the Pope was still in his hospital room, and Wyszinski was right on the edge of death and there was a phone connection made between them. And we've heard from the aides of both men that they were in tears, and that they spoke with enormous, deep feeling and deep, deep understanding of what was beginning to happen. Whatever the words were between them on that occasion, when the mentor was dying and when he was saying good-bye to the man he knew would be the hope for Polish freedom--whatever the words were, Wyszinski would have heard a recovering Pope; he would have heard that the man he had trained in how to deal with the Communists and the Soviets was coming back, that he had survived, that he was now talking and vibrant and full of ideas again. And so, he died with hope.

On the Pope's second trip to Poland, martial law had taken over. The Communists had found an excuse to go in and take over with military force. And the Pope went back. A lot of people, I remember, in America thought that he's betraying his own cause. He's going to acknowledge this military regime. It's an old trick of the Pope. He always will go in and acknowledge the existence of whatever's in power, because he knows he has a transforming potential when he does it.

So he goes back on the second trip and...there's martial law. That gaunt, powerful figure of Wyszinski is gone and no longer beside him; the Pope's on his own now. The world is wondering, what is he going to do? Is he going to acknowledge this regime? And so we're all looking very closely when Jarulzelski and the Pope come out for their first public formal meeting. They're both standing not too far from each other in a room behind their separate microphones. And the camera pans down and we realize that Jarulzelski's standing there--I believe he had his dark shades on-- and his knees are trembling.

And we all searched for explanations--why are his knees trembling standing in front of the Pope? We looked for explanations, such as well, there's a medical condition or he's on some kind of medication, something like that. Ultimately, he explained, no, it really was what it looked like: I was trembling in awe at the responsibility and importance of this man in front of me. Jarulzelski himself ultimately said those were the classic clichéd trembling knees in front of something I knew was extremely powerful. The Pope had this kind of authenticity of nationhood--if you will, of importance. So that even Jarulzelski himself was put on notice that he was in front of the master. It was a remarkable image...that we could barely believe ourselves, of the centered, calm power of this man who had come back in, gotten back on the horse, he'd been assassinated virtually successfully, but had recovered, and now he'd come back in to continue the fight.

I'm sure he knew that Jarulzelski knew, that for a thousand years great religious Catholic leaders had marshaled a sense of independence in Poland and it was happening again. There was no question about it. Now, what's interesting about that second trip, the West kept wondering because we didn't fully yet understand the Pope's means of getting next to a dictator and transforming a dictator, whether or not he wasn't caving in a bit. He seemed to be acknowledging the regime. There was some talk about deals with the World Bank that if this went off peacefully and there was no violence perhaps there might be some kind of new loans to help Poland get out of its financial trouble. But we couldn't be sure.

And then at the very end of this trip, another trip where there was enormous crowds everywhere, as if to say, it wasn't just the excitement of the first trip back to Poland, it wasn't an accident, we're still with this political leader of ours, this religious-political leader of ours, the crowds are still just as big, we're still just as jubilant. At the end of that trip, he met in the southern mountains where he had grown up, Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity. And the word came out immediately after that private visit where they helicoptered up to meet each other from his closest aides and from aides of Walesa, that the Pope had, in effect, said to Walesa, "Cool it for a bit, don't go too far too fast." And there was a number of people--analysts and pundits--who thought that the Pope has gone soft, he's betrayed his own cause, he's giving in. But of course, that wasn't the case. What the Pope was doing was basically saying to Walesa, we've got them, don't spoil it. This has got to be slow and sure. We'll never withdraw, sometimes we'll slow down, we keep up the pressure, but don't give the military powers in Moscow or in Warsaw any excuse. This is a non-violent revolution.

When the Pope went to the United Nations in New York on the occasion of its 50^th anniversary, he referred to "our non-violent revolution of 1989." That's how he remembered it, that's the one adjective that he uses, non-violent revolution of 1989. He's talking of course of the ten-year revolution that ended in 1989, the year that the Soviet Union came apart. But this non-violent theme was utmost in his mind; he knew that he was in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And, in his mind, very much in the tradition of Jesus, who specifically did not go the guerrilla route. These are all of a piece for him. It's, in his mind, the same kind of religious-political movement that insists on the inviolable dignity of every human, even your enemies. Whatever else, no hitting, no violence.

Can you talk about the Pope and the media--the fact that he became Pope in the year 1978, a year which was a turning point for the world media.

1978 was the year in the history of technology when the global village arrived. Not only satellites, but videotape editing machines in the field.

That was the first year of the global village and it was the first year of this papacy. John Paul II was the first superstar, if you will, of the global village. Ironically, because he had been denied access to the media back in Poland, he had developed a great skill at dealing with crowds in a very natural way. The television camera reveals character, it just lets it shine through.

So suddenly when we had television cameras in a global village sense everywhere in the world, we have this figure of world importance who had a great natural charisma with crowds. It was a bit of fate for him that he was able to come in at a time when he could project his image around the world as somebody who insisted on this kind of unashamed sense of human dignity and, and the religion as he sees it, of liberation. That had an enormous effect in his battle against Moscow. In effect, in all those trips, he surrounded Moscow for 10 years--not only going to Poland, but going to many other dictatorships as well and giving the same message to them. And those dictators in other places, Brazil, and the Philippines, they too were unsettled by his visit. So, he knew the reports of those trips were going to be filtering back into the Communist world. He encircled Moscow politically through these religious trips that he knew were conveyed across the global television network...

Can you talk about the Pope's religious-political strategy.

What happened is, John Paul applied this religious-political strategy that had been developed by Wyszinski in Poland to the world. After he became Pope he went on these trips, many of them to dictatorships, he would talk his way in, in effect, by saying to the dictator, "Look, let me come in, I'll acknowledge your regime, you can stand next to me and get some of my stardust, but I will preach human rights, I'll preach non-violence, and you'll like that, but I'll preach human rights and it'll give you a chance to make some of those reforms you say you want to make."

And so, always tempted by the promise of having their regime acknowledged, these dictators accepted his visits and time and again, it proved a mistake for them. He went to Brazil where a military government was in power. And the Pope went into this enormous stadium with a hundred thousand workers and said, "You were right to hold those illegal demonstrations, and your illegal trade unions, those are your rights." He also preached non-violence, and he also acknowledgedBrazil's leader,Figueiredo, and met with him in a very polite way.

He went...to Chile where there was a dictator, and...some violence broke out and he spoke strongly against violence there, which had enormous overtones in that country. He went to the Philippines and again the dictator was sucked in by the same temptation and he appeared with the Pope on a stage in front of these enormous crowds that the Pope was attracting in the Philippines, and said, "Holy Father, now that you're here, we will mend our ways."

But already the wedge was in the door, and this idea of encouraging the mass of people in their desire for human rights, the individual dignity of every person, which is the central theme of this Pope in everything he teaches, always came across, the dictator sooner or later fell, and on that trip to the Philippines, for that matter, the Pope was doing something symbolic; he was literally surrounding the Soviet Union when he flew, I remember, from Rome to the Philippines where there was enormous crowds for a whole week, demonstrating again his political power if you will. We then went to Japan where he visited Hiroshima, and the quickest way home from Japan was across the North Pole. He literally went right around the Soviet Union. In effect, that's what he did for the 10 years in which Solidarity was building. The Pope kept going out around the world, to places often where there was dictators in power, and giving the same messages there, with great success, that he was giving in Poland. So he was surrounding the Soviet Union in a spiritual and an ideological way as well. It had an enormous political effect.

This pope is an extraordinary media spokesperson. How does the pope work his magic with the public?

He enjoys himself. He likes people. Every time he gets with people he gets energized. We who covered him know this personally because we had a great deal of immediate, personal conversation with him. He's the first pope in history who ever gave press conferences, but there's only one place he does it, at 35,000 feet. And the longer the trip to a country, the more likely he...is to get bored and come to the back end of the plane. He would literally walk down one aisle, up these wide-bodied jets we were often traveling on, there were sixty or seventy journalists from all around the world at the back end of the plane. And then up the other aisle.

We'd arrange ourselves in language groups, you know the French-speaking journalists here, the Germans here, and over here the Italians, the English-speaking. And he would, in these jostling airplanes, come up and we'd all be standing in the aisles, the tape recorders rolling, the cameras in everybody's faces, elbow to elbow, literally jostling shoulders with them, and ask him any question we want. And what impressed us in general about his personal style is, he really enjoyed that. Now, more than twenty years later, he still enjoys it. And he's struggling with Parkinson's, and you can still see him enjoying answering the unexpected question...

I asked him once--after about two years, I was hearing lots of complaints from some of the old, more bureaucratic-minded people in the Vatican--I said to him at 35,000 feet on one of these trips, "Holy Father, some people in the Vatican think you're traveling too much." And he was sort of surprised, and a big smile came across his face and he tapped me on the arm and said, "Yes, you're right, I am, I agree, I am traveling too much." and he turned away. And then he turned back and raised his finger with a wry smile and said, "But sometimes it's necessary to do something of what is too much." And then he turned away again. Now, that explains half of what happened, I think, in Poland. Because he was saying sometimes you've got to be strong, and surprise people and be courageous if you know what you're doing. And go out and do things.

But the point here is we knew personally--thosewho traveled with him--he liked the unexpected question, he liked being tested. It was like one of those speakers who enjoys the question period most because he believes in what he's saying. Now, television has this ability to reveal character. It just does it. Gloria Steinem said it once after one of the great presidential debates, "television reveals character." The camera never blinks. He knows that. But he didn't have to worry about it. He developed authenticity with crowds and people in Poland because he was denied access to the media there. That's why he rose in Poland. Whereas a media personality might have otherwise have risen there if the Church in the '50s and '60s and '70s had been able to use the media. He couldn't. So, he's a person who genuinely enjoys being tested and getting with folks. At those Wednesday audiences where he meets with people from all around the world, often you can tell that this is the happiest part of his day.

Did he do anything strange or surprising? Did he ever get angry in your conversations in the plane?

Our...conversations with him in the plane covered every single subject you can imagine. He would sometimes get serious, sometimes get very intellectual, sometimes get kind of whimsical and joke with us. He enjoyed adapting to each of these different questions from each of these different national groups of journalists...I never saw him lose it in any of those conversations, but he could get very intense and piercing with his eyes when he felt something very strongly or he was referring to something down on the ground that he knew was a problem he didn't like. And Latin America had one of those problems for him.

On some of our first trips into Latin America with him to Brazil, to Central America, the big question at the time was about liberation theology--these Marxist-aligned groups that were building up within the Catholic Church in Latin America. We asked him on some of those trips flying into these countries--what about liberation theology? And he'd get very stern, and he would say, "It depends on whose liberation theology. If we're talking about the liberation theology of Christ, not Marx, I'm very much for it." And he taught us about the fact that, in effect, liberation theology was something that he had learned from Wyszinski and that they all felt was theirs, not the Communists. They had used it in their mind, and were using it in their mind to defeat the Communists. So he was very concerned when flying into Latin America on those early trips to separate the liberation theology movements in Latin America from anything that was Marxist, or specifically aligned with any political party.

That's why he made a big point when he became Pope of asking Father Dryden, the American priest, to leave the government. Because he knew the moral authority for political change that he would have depended on should not be aligned with any other political entity. It had to be only the Jesus Party, if you will. The Catholic Church. He knew that he was going to make a big political difference. He'd been doing it for thirty years in Poland. And he wanted to make sure that he had all his troops with him, and not with any other party...

Tell me about one of the most dramatic moments that reveals the passion of the Pope in relation to liberation theology.

When the Pope went to Central America, for example, he knew that he had to carry this liberation spirituality in his own performance in a way that would be very convincing in Central America. Because he was very worried about the Marxist shift in liberation theology there, that had been developing for some decades...He expressed it unambiguously when he got on the ground in Latin America. In Nicaragua, where the priest Ernesto Cardenal was a member of the government, the Pope publicly, in front of the world, admonished him with both fingers. He said, like this, "you must leave the government. You must make yourself right with the church. You must follow the way we're doing things, not the Marxist way," in effect, was what he was saying. We saw Ernesto Cardenal nodding, "yes, yes, yes, Holy Father, yes."

He was visibly angry, because he wanted to make the point that liberation theology was his, not the Communists. It was something that he and Wyszinski had developed in Poland. And their success, and his success in Poland already is something he knew could help give moral authority and credibility to his desire to do it in Latin America--because he was coming in effect from his triumphal visits to Poland into Latin America, saying, "I am dealing with the Communists over there, I'm going to deal with them here in Latin America." Liberation theology is something that was originally invented by Christ--that was the line that Wyszinski had developed, this way of emphasizing what the Christian message is about. Christ was for the poor and the oppressed in a way that Marx can never be. And it's something that we're doing in Poland, we're doing it over there in the Communist world, we're going to do it here. And he fought very hard to send this message, which he sent successfully, that the Church in Latin America will detach itself from the Marxist movement.

This Pope had to be aware that the Church had been aligned traditionally with the most corrupt part of the hierarchy in Central and South America.

John Paul was profoundly aware of the history of corruption of the Catholic Church in Latin America--of the number of centuries and countries in which the head of the Church and the head of the government had been together and that it had not served the causes of human rights. So he knew he had a double task here. He had to build something new. He was not in any sense trying to build something that was going to go back to the old style of alignment with the government there. At the same time, he was really worried that he had to fight communism there as well as back in Poland. And so he insisted on this.

We didn't know where he was going to go from there and it ultimately turned out to be one of the less politically successful parts of this pontificate. Because twenty years later, the advisors in the Vatican were talking about the fact that there was too much of a separation from the popular movements in Latin America and that perhaps some of the communist-based communities in Brazil became so disillusioned so quickly with the Catholic Church that they may have been more vulnerable as the Vatican sees it to conversion by some of the Protestant movements which are winning so many people away. In other words, his liberation theology from that point of view didn't have as much success in Latin America as it did in the Communist world where it was invented.

Do you think he painted too broad of a brush of the Marxist red tag on these liberation theologians?

History will be the ultimate judge of this but it does seem to be that he may have had too simplistic an understanding of just how communist, how Marxist, some of these liberation theology movements in Latin America were. It may be a little bit early to tell whether that really was the case, but he may have been a little bit less subtle in dealing with how to separate the Catholic Church from communism and Marxism in Latin America than he was in Poland. He didn't have the same cultural access or understanding there. He had to work through the priests there. It was the same general campaign, but it wasn't as successful. He lost more people in the process there than he did in Poland.

Did you ever hear him acknowledge this alignment of the Church with the rich and powerful hierarchy of these Latin American countries?

The conversations we had with him on some of those long trips revealed to us that, not surprisingly, he was intimately aware of the troubled history of the Church in Latin America. And he would talk to us about the delicacy of doing what he was trying to do there, of trying to change courses in mid-stream, if you will--going from one kind of liberation theology to another kind of liberation theology.

He was unambiguous about the fact that he wanted Latin America to have liberation theology. He didn't want it, in any sense, to go back to what was inferred in his conversations, the old way of close relations between some of the regimes and the Church that had existed earlier in the century. He wanted liberation theology but he knew he had a difficult job here to do this adjustment--to keep the theology and change the name on the liberation tag. And perhaps twenty years later...it's clear that he didn't succeed as well in Latin America as he did in Europe.

What does politics mean to this Pope?

His first trip three months after he was elected Pope, the trip to Mexico, was a political earthquake. The leaders around the world must have sat bolt-upright when they saw two things happen: he lands in Mexico and immediately there are these enormous crowds far greater than any political leader could ever dream of pulling out. I believe it was said the largest ever assembled on earth--5 million people one day when he went to the Shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

So first of all, there's that political clout that he demonstrates right out of the box--I got people jubilant, they're going to be inclined to listen to what I say. And then he went to Pueblo Mexico to meet with all the bishops from Latin America and he delivered a speech to them in which he said unambiguously "politics is the Church's business when it involves how people treat people. Let's not pretend that's not politics," he was saying, "it is." Human rights, human dignity, there is, he reminded everybody who hadn't been paying any attention, a long history of Catholic social teaching: we will not shrink back from this arena of activity. And the combination of these two things: these crowds and that message, I mean, you could almost hear the leaders in Moscow and other dictatorships around the world sitting up and saying, "My goodness, this is going to be something to contend with."

Politics is at the center of what John Paul understands the nature of his religion and faith to be about. He talks in his sermons about how Jesus dealt with occupying armies of Rome. And the questions that were troubling everybody because of the occupying armies of Rome in the Middle East two thousand years ago. The parallels are obvious. He is going into other places where people are suffering oppression and dictatorships from the outside. He talks explicitly and openly about this. So there's this unambiguous, unashamed declaration of what we're going to be about, right at the beginning of his papacy. He lived up to it.

How do you see and understand the Pope's devotion to the Virgin Mary? What does she mean to him? How does he express it?

I'm not a Catholic. It's hard for me to understand the cult of Mary. The letter "M" is on his personal shield. His emblem as Pope he chose the letter "M." 'Totus tuos" is what he chose as his motto, "all for you Mary." He was signaling to the world that as Pope, Mary was extremely important to him; his symbol, his emblem. When he was so successfully shot and he should have died, it took them five minutes to get the ambulance started and he almost bled to death, and he knows he should have died, he said afterwards, "I believe this was a blessing from the Virgin Mary" who kept him alive. He had a mosaic of Mary placed high on the outside wall of the Vatican, right there above the place where he was shot in St. Peter's Square. And so, he's been telling the world that she means an enormous amount to him. He went after he recovered from that assassination to Portugal at the shrine of Fatima to take the bullet that should have killed him and put it in the crown of the Virgin Mary there at Fatima. So he's sending this signal.

Now this doesn't dominate his travels. When we go on trips with him we don't go from Marian shrine to Marian shrine. Nonetheless, they do keep happening. We know that she's very real to him, that just as with Christ, he believes also Mary intervened in history. There's a great deal of, I think, intellectual excitement and interest that he gets by contemplating the relationship between Mary and Christ and the disciples. I mean, to him, perhaps in a way that's not so true for people in America who are separated by an ocean and another continent from the Middle East, the Jesus story is a very real, flesh-and-blood story. In the early Christians, the travels of Mary and the surviving disciples afterwards are very real, flesh-and-blood stories that happened in countries neighboring Poland in effect, just slightly to the South. So, he sees her as an integral part of the young, early Church. He reads those parts of the Bible which give hints that she was with them in the continuation of Christianity as it was beginning to take hold, and taking its message of rising above the violence of the flesh and blood of life into something transcendent. He knows that she's parT of that.

As a non-Catholic, it's hard for me to understand it in this visceral way. And obviously when you travel through Poland with him, you see that Mary is a very central part of Catholicism, and of getting a sort of touchstone on real life in the religion. More than that, I don't know. It's a bit of a mystery to me.

What was the geo-political purpose of the Pope's visit to Cuba?

The Cuba trip was classic John Paul. He was going to a Communist dictator, the last Communist dictator really on the planet now. And he had a special kind of mission there. He understood that Castro, and Washington also, had a community of interest. Nobody wanted to see violence erupt in Cuba after Fidel Castro eventually leaves. Fidel Castro didn't want violence to come and upset whatever gains he sees his revolution having made. There was this militant complaint from Miami that threatened to unsettle Cuba as well. So once again, in Cuba, John Paul arrives, he acknowledges the regime...much that the Pope teaches about human justice and social dignity are in line with what Fidel Castro teaches. And the Pope was allowed by Castro to work his way through Cuba to begin to enliven the Church again as he and Wyszinski had done in Poland to win a few more little freedoms, little by little, slow, steady change is best, as John Paul believes, and it began to work.

Even though the world, by coincidence, was completely distracted--at least America was--by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which broke out just as John Paul arrived in Cuba, it didn't make any difference. The trip came off according to plan. It built, the crowds were more and more enthusiastic as he went, until finally at the end of that week, with Fidel Castro present, there in the square in Havana, the crowds were cheering and there was this great sense of community and solidarity, and Fidel Castro was approving. Fidel Castro, himself, had been educated by Jesuit priests, he was beginning to talk to them again. Moreover, there's a great community of interest between this Pope and Fidel Castro when it comes to--'what kind of Church should exist in Cuba?' Castro has always made a point of saying that when he first took power, the vast majority of priests whom he kicked out were not really Cuban, they were Spanish. When he was a bishop back in Poland, Wojtyla was famous for saying every national Church has to live its own national life. So Castro knew there was this great self-respect for national identity and non-violence in this Pope.

We heard from his close aides that soon after he got back to Rome after the Cuba trip, the Pope was elated. It had come off just as he had wanted. He had planted the seeds similar to what he had done in Poland that would begin to see slow, steady change, little by little, winning more freedom for the Church, so he hoped, in Cuba. And indeed, the following Christmas, for the first time, Castro allowed Christmas again. The Pope knows this game, he knows it has to go slowly. He knows that what he's after is a change of mind and heart in the dictator. But he believes he's got the wedge in the door again there, and that it's beginning to work. John Paul II believes that the old Wyszinski formula is also now working in Cuba.

Critics of the pope describe the Castro visit as his way of doing it right this time when he didn't do it completely right with Liberation Theology.

That's true. When he finally went to Cuba, it was after all not only to a Communist dictatorship, but also back to Latin America where his efforts to win liberation theology away from the Marxists, for the Church, had not been so successful perhaps in his earlier pontificate. Now, he had the chance to come back in and speak again to Latin America from a Communist dictatorship again, and readjust his version of liberation theology for Latin America. He was still trying for that next goal, to get that one right, because he knew he hadn't quite done it convincingly in Latin America. He'd lost more followers there than he had in Poland. And so I think that that was also part of what was animating him as a new challenge.

And this is certainly a pope who loves his challenges. When he went back to Cuba he was helping Castro possibly lay the foundation for a new kind of freedom for the Church, a new kind of post-Castro Cuba that might not be so violent, that might preach non-violence. But also sending a signal to all of Latin America--"Look, I have a lot in common in my social teachings with some of the ideals of Castro, in trying to bring about equality to the oppressed." So he was perhaps trying to readjust what he hadn't done so well on his earlier trips to Latin America.

Was there any scene that you saw personally where the Pope was moved beyond words? That shows the passion for the Virgin Mary?

Of course there was the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City, his first trip abroad where he brought out the largest crowd ever assembled on earth-- about 5 million people--to the Shrine of Our Virgin at Guadalupe. And there were several other Marian shrines. But if we want to understand this visceral feeling for this woman who entered history 2000 years ago, you go to Jasna Gora, the Black Madonna, this is the centerpiece, without words, just being, of Polish nationalism. She's the most holy relic in Poland.

He knows that he is in the line of great religious leaders who will win yet again the freedom of the Polish people, and at the center of that is the great redoubt of the monastery fortress of Jasna Gora, where he went immediately on each of his trips with the most emotional crowds--and in the middle of that is the Black Madonna. She's central to his iconography, I think, perhaps more than any other thing, other than Christ on the cross. This Black Madonna. The symbolism for him not just of pure human love, of the only person born with Immaculate Conception--but of immaculate nationhood, the dream of immaculate nationhood. They would take her out at these holy processions. She's at the center of his political march from the beginning.

I'll tell you something interesting here. I can't say that I've ever seen him be more moved in front of the Virgin Mary than he was in front of any other saint or any other crowd...There's such an equanimity, such equilibrium in him, of his religious intensity, that you don't see in his moments when suddenly he's obviously very moved. That's a very interesting thing about his personality. Other religious leaders or political leaders we notice sometimes, "oh my goodness, now he's really moved." This pope's always in control, and it may be that he's always in control in a state of ecstasy for all I know. But...there's an equilibrium to it.

It's an interesting question, because when I think back on it, he was obviously moved when he prayed at Auschwitz. He's obviously moved when he's talking to the Virgin Mary. But he's always very centered and controlled. He's very conscious of his person as a walking symbol of whatever his cause is. He's always very conscious of that; it makes you conscious of it.

After about three or four years of this, always traveling in the van right behind him, right in front of him on these trips through these enormous crowds, we never saw anything of the countries we visited but we saw everybody who lived there it seemed, and I asked him, "Holy Father, how does it make you feel as a person to have these millions of people cheering for you, they're looking at you. Does it go to your head, does it make you vain? How'd it make you feel?"

He loves these unexpected questions. He cocks his head to one side and says, "Hmmm, well you know I don't think they're cheering for myself," in that peculiar John Paul English. "I don't think they're cheering for myself, I think they're cheering for Peter, the papacy, for the symbol of what I stand for. That's why they're cheering." It...seemed an authentic answer, he does believe that. And I think he has a very conscious sense developed in Poland in years as a public figure. That it's his job to remain disciplined in the midst of the jubilation so the jubilation can happen. He provides the core, the center of it.

Tell me about the question David Willy asked the Pope.

On one of these long trips, the Pope got bored and came to the back-end of the plane and spent a long time with us. He got around to our little English-language group of journalists, cameras rolling, and David Willey of the BBC asked him, we were all just standing tight close together, nose to nose, and he said, "Holy Father, you know that there's going to be millions and millions of children born every year in this world...who are bound to die young and who will live lives of depravity because of the lack of material wealth in the world. How in Heaven's name, in a world like this, can you object to artificial birth control?"

And the Pope looked him in the eye and said, "The answer is, as it always was, responsible parenthood." And David Willey, not to be out-done, shot right back at the Pope and said, "Yes, but what's responsible parenthood?" And the Pope shot right back at him, "You know." And David didn't quite know what to say, his smile was gone. He was just insisting on his position there. Artificial birth control is perhaps the single most controversial position this Pope holds. The...Catholic hierarchy, bishops and priests and cardinals in America have delivered the Pope a thunderous silence on this subject. Not on abortion. They'll say on abortion..."You're right," most of them will say, but on birth control, he has brought very few people with him.

Many of the most conservative church leaders I know will talk off the record and say, "You look back at the documents of Vatican II and it's already clear that his ban on artificial birth control doesn't fit. It's wrong, it makes a mistake. This is the most puzzling thing to me, and as recent research has uncovered, it seems that it was the research done in Poland by Cardinal Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, which most influenced Paul VI to come out against artificial birth control in the1968. So that in upholding Paul VI now in Humanae Vitae, John Paul is basically upholding what his own study group had figured out in the first place.

"The Responsible Parenthood" response. What does it mean?

...As I understand it, he's referring back to a basic tenant of Catholicism that what Catholicism teaches about moral action, certainly in interpersonal relationships, are things that are written on our heart already and that we know instinctively--if we don't get clouded--are right.

He seems to be arguing there, that if humans really listen to themselves about personal dignity, bodily dignity, and natural chastity, that you would reject, he believes, artificial intervention in what is taught by the Catholics to be arguably the most grace-giving thing a husband and wife can do...Protestants like myself are fascinated to learn when we begin to learn about Catholicism that the history of it is really relatively pro-sexuality. That Catholicism's argument with the world's attitude towards sex, is not that it makes too much of it, but that it makes to little of it, and it treats it too loosely. I think that's the line that John Paul seems to be trying to take when he says, "If you listen to yourself, you will find a voice within that tells you that there's something wrong in the nature of artificial birth control."

I haven't made much intellectual headway beyond that in trying to understand what his argument is. But I do know that that one position of his is the one which the vast majority of even conservative church leaders don't go along with him on. In marriage, the idea that every single act has to be open to the possibility of procreation, they tell me, off the record, they cannot find any theological basis for it. It's an interesting thing to discuss.

Could we return to your memories of those plane trips with the Pope over many years. Can you recall some more moments or conversations during those trips which are revelatory about his character or personality?

These little conversations we had with him on the plane often stuck in my mind afterwards as revealing in very short form, almost haiku form, something about his nature. Because they were immediate, unrehearsed. We asked him everything we could think of asking. After four or five years it seemed we'd run out of questions. He would spend so long with us, we'd come back to our home offices and sometimes be amused at seeing the big famous anchor people trying to figure out how to be the first to get a sit-down interview with the Pope. We'd sort of scratch our heads and say, "Why bother?" We've been talking to him at length on the plane for a long time, always in this unrehearsed way, and he loves tough questions, he loves them the most.

So, he told me on one occasion that it was sometimes necessary to do something of what is too much--travel too much. That's half of what he did in Poland. He was out in front of everybody, he was declaring that "I know what I'm doing, you gotta follow me." The other half of what he did was, I thought, sometimes indicated by another answer he gave us. On the fifth or sixth year we were in our little group, and there was somebody who was new on the plane who'd not covered him before, who asked a question. He said, "Holy Father, you already spoke about nine languages quite fluently when you became Pope, and since becoming Pope you've learned two more. "How, in Heaven's name have you been able to learn two more languages since becoming Pope?" And he cocked his head to one side and he said, "Well, you know, whenever I set out to learn a language I think to myself, 'I'm not going to get all of it, but I'll get some of it.'"

And to me, that is very much Wojtyla. It speaks of the patience of knowing you cannot get everything, but you've got to try. That was very much the spirit of what he did in Poland. He did something of what is too much--he's not going to get all of it, or at least get all of it right away, but he'll get some of it. It's a nice little window into the essentially pragmatic nature of this pope.

This is the other thing I wanted to mention...He's very down-to-earth. For him there's no difference between a spiritualistic world of religion up here and the flesh and blood, down-to-earth world of cause and effect and science down here. This Pope loves science, he's got an inquiring mind. He has a group of scientists from around the world that he calls in every year. He's very much aware of theories of relativity and the Big Bang, and what science is doing in outer space.

His Vatican recently named "2001: A SpaceOdyssey" as one of the most important movies of all time. We know that he sees no division between what science is saying and what his religion is saying. He often uses the quote from Jesus, "The truth will make you free," or, "It's the truth that makes us free." And...this is sort of the third corner of the triangle, if you will--between his faith, his politics, and his science. They're all in the same world. The political story surrounding Jesus is very real to him. The ideas of trans-substantiation, of afterlife being mysterious, of how they might be illuminated by the theories of relativity, of what modern science is doing to figure out the mechanics of the Big Bang, of what Darwinian science is telling us about how our bodies evolved.

I've heard him give talks in which it's quite clear that these things do not threaten him in any way. He doesn't see any division here. One of the first sermons he gave after he was elected, at the Wednesday audiences, was about the book of Genesis. And he said very explicitly, "The Book of Genesis is a metaphor." The word Adam doesn't mean male. It meant human. And then God, as we developed, decided to divide the human into two halves, because the only creature who could really feel the pain, the abyss of meaninglessness, was Adam. And so he had pity and so he divided us into two so that man and woman could comfort each other. But it's a metaphor he went on to emphasize.

He made it very clear to followers that you don't have to take a literalistic view of the Book of Genesis. He's unambiguous about that. He's quite excited by the findings of science and enjoys finding ways in which what the Bible has written and what his religion has taught are metaphorical variations, if you will, on what science is learning more and more about the details of.

Can you address the American/Vatican connection? There are those stories about how there was a signficant alliance between the Pope and the Reagan administration...

From the beginning, I believe that the Pope's spirituality was the same thing as his politics--his understanding of how you revive your spirit in the midst of oppression, in the midst of political disaster. Krakow in World War II with the Nazis and the Holocaust all around him. And later, when he was putting together Solidarity. I was much involved with the coverage from the beginning of all of that. He was often talking to people at the American embassy to the Vatican who were themselves always talking to the Pope. And we were aware that they were interpreting to Washington constantly what the Pope was doing. But I think that even if the U.S. hadn't existed, and the CIA hadn't existed, trying to interpret what he was doing--the Pope would still have been doing the same kind of thing in Poland. There have been some interpretations which say that it was really an intense alliance between Reagan and the Pope, figuring out how to collude together to overthrow the Communists in Poland. That doesn't feel right to me at all.

Of course the Pope's a realist and he was aware what the balancing powers in the world were, and he was certainly interested that Washington should understand what he was doing. But he was out in front of everybody. He often as well left it up to Washington to figure out what he was doing.