"...what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings' palaces. Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet." (Matthew 11: 8-9)

As I write, rivers of people from all over the world continue to stream—fly, drive, train, bus, bike, and hike—into Rome to pay their respects to Pope John Paul II. One stunned CNN reporter described it as the "largest gathering of people in human history."

Not even Mother Teresa of Calcutta, John Paul’s contemporary female alter-ego, drew such devotion.

Echoing Christ's words about the crowds gathering around John the Baptist, one might ask: What have they come to see? Not even Mother Teresa of Calcutta, John Paul's contemporary female alter-ego, drew such devotion.

A few grumpy souls on both Left and Right remain steadfastly aloof. The Left, as ever afflicted with the disease that Chesterton, in the context of H.G. Wells' dreadful History of the World, referred to as "presentism," maintains that Karol Wotjyla stood in the way of Progress—that irresistible force which will in due time bring about the inevitable Advent, not of the Second Coming, but of women priests, gay marriages, and a Catholic license to contracept. A progressive's idea of heaven on earth.

Some on the Right, meanwhile, not to be outdone in condescension by their counterparts ad sinistra, cannot summon enthusiasm for a pope who failed to prevent folk masses in their IKEA-designed sanctuaries, or gays in their seminaries. If John Paul had spent half as much time excommunicating heretics as he did rubbing shoulders with rabbis and imams, they opine, the Church wouldn't be in the mess it's in today. (Both sides typically persist in confusing the American Church with the Universal Church; contrary to both positions, the Church in South America, Africa, and Asia is not only largely orthodox, but growing by leaps and bounds.)

Flummoxed by the outpouring of grief and love in the streets of Rome, particularly from young people, certain post-mortem critics of John Paul II have even taken to grumbling about a "cult of personality," as if Karol Wotjyla's obvious impact on a surprisingly large chunk of humanity was all about charm and wit, about charisma and a knack for baby-kissing without looking like an idiot—no small gift, to be sure, and one that John Paul unquestionably possessed to a remarkable degree. Bishop John Magee, former master of papal ceremonies, called it a genius for the symbolic gesture.

The Left maintains that Karol Wotjyla stood in the way of Progress.

In a generation whose life-long over-exposure to every manner of media spin has endowed it with a highly sensitive bullshit detector, charisma, and even holiness, cannot explain what we are witnessing in this historic papal interregnum: the beginnings of a vox populi declaration—vox populi is the only way it occurs, and it has only occurred twice in two thousand years—that John Paul II, along with Popes Gregory I and Leo I, was perhaps one of "the Greats."

Why? Why now, and why John Paul II?

A quick look at the precedents may shed some light.

Leo the Great, Saint and Doctor, who reigned AD 440-461, is credited with keeping the barque of Peter afloat in the sea of heresies, from Pelagianism to Manichaeism to Monophysitism. These errors nearly flooded the Church in the wake of barbarian depredations and the ongoing collapse of the Roman empire. Leo the Great personally outfaced Attila the Hun, who threatened to invade Rome in 452.

Gregory the Great, Saint and Doctor, who reigned AD 590-604, likewise fought off heresies and secured the Church against his barbarian hordes—different tribes, same difference. He also sent out missionaries to the far reaches of the known world, reformed the liturgy, and centralized ecclesial finances, administration, and Christian doctrine. Gregory's Herculean efforts enabled the Church to transition through violent times into a new era, the so-called "Middle Ages"—all while suffering a host of ailments that have felled men with far fewer cares.

The Right cannot summon enthusiasm for a pope who failed to prevent folk masses in their IKEA-designed sanctuaries, or gays in their seminaries.

Since Divine Mercy Sunday, a few critics notwithstanding, news analysts, men and women in the streets, and heads of state have all been sounding similar notes in their eulogies of John Paul II. For his fans, Karol Wotjyla is the prophetic figure who, at the close of the bloodiest and most barbaric century in human history, in spite of an assassin's bullet and Parkinson's disease, missionized the world in an exhausting and unprecedented series of travels; inoculated the Church against mutated strains of the same heresies Leo and Gregory combated centuries ago; began the painful process of reconciliation with both the Jewish people and separated Christian brethren; and played a decisive and perhaps pivotal role in the defeat of that twentieth century version of barbarism known as Soviet communism. That the latter happened, in our Strangelovian age, with nary a shot being fired might well be regarded as an event only modestly less miraculous than the Resurrection.

A wise priest, deeply concerned about the crisis in the American Church after Vatican II (post hoc, not propter hoc), commented to me some twenty years ago that it usually takes about four hundred years for the Church to fully absorb and incorporate the move of the Spirit after a major Ecumenical Council. It is my own firm belief that because of John Paul II this difficult process, which Cardinal Newman once described as the development of doctrine, will take a century or two less. To suggest that the sorry state of the fat-and-sassy American Church is due to Karol Wojtyla's failure to lead, rather than our own American prideful, selfish, church-of-what's-happening-now refusal to be led, seems comparable to faulting Christ for "failing" the Rich Young Man.

For as we stumble into the third millennium, there is one more, perhaps less appreciated aspect to the papacy of John Paul II that may yet prove the most critical of all. One media reporter described John Paul II's "strict adherence to traditional Catholic morality and theology." That's one point of view. In reality, John Paul II forged a new synthesis of Catholic teaching that papal biographer George Weigel called "one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries." In the vernacular, it was a paradigm shift.

This "reconfiguration" is the post-Vatican II "Communio" school of theology often called "Christian personalism." At the heart of this new philosophical and theological synthesis, and of Karol Wotjyla's pastoral message, stands the dignity of the human person—a human dignity so great and mysterious, made in the image and likeness of God, that the only proper response to it is a self-giving exchange of love. Conversely, the greatest sin against this human dignity is not so much hate (which is essentially an emotion) as use—treating the human subject like an "object," an "it" instead of a "thou."

Here at last was a man with ‘traditional’ views on sexuality that weren’t, well, traditional.

The implications of such an orientation extend well beyond the realms of theology and philosophical anthropology: into politics, economics, the arts, social and familial relationships, and cultural norms generally. This vital thesis about the human person as a living, enfleshed icon of God will, doubtless, spawn innumerable treatises and doctoral dissertations for generations to come.

Given the oft-noted popularity of John Paul II with young people, let's for a moment consider the implications of Christian personalism for a subject of profoundest interest and concern to both youth and the Church: sex. Christian personalism undergirds the Pope's "theology of the body"—a phrase which until this week I had never before heard on television outside of EWTN—and has the potential of giving young people, the shapers of tomorrow's world, exactly the weapons they need to overcome the culture of death. The fully grasped dignity of the human person is the cornerstone of the culture of life.

For countless thousands of youth, capable of spotting a hypocrite at a thousand paces, John Paul II was the "Real Deal"; the pope who gave true, vigorous, and (for lack of a better word) manly witness to the Gospel of Life. Here at last was a man with "traditional" views on sexuality that weren't, well, traditional. He drew the lines in all the old places, but for new and suddenly exciting reasons; John Paul's reasons made sense from a holistic and even ecological point of view.

The sexual revolution finally come-a-cropper in a rich harvest of diseases, abortions, divorces, and personal miseries of every description. Now, the age-old moral stances on sexuality can no longer be dismissed as a "because the Church says so" form of patriarchal reductionism. Our very bodies, John Paul II has taught us, exhibit a nuptial meaning; our bodies, enfleshed spirits, show us that the Creator has designed us to give ourselves as Gift to the Other; they have destined us to live in relationship, as God Himself lives in relationship, Three in One.

This new synthesis may prove, as was the work of Thomas Aquinas to the High Middle Ages, to be the foundation of a new ‘civilization of love.’

The seed of this understanding was planted from the beginning, of course, in Genesis, and given almost poetic shape in the Song of Songs, the Gospels, and writings of Paul about the Church as Bride of Christ. John Paul II pulled all these strands of truth into a tapestry of truth—faith in search of reason—in a way that makes thoroughgoing and incarnational common sense.

George Weigel has called the theology of the body a "theological time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the Church."

In the vacuum left by the exploded "isms" of the twentieth century, this new synthesis of Christian personalism, if embraced by the generation of youth that's now winding through the streets of Rome, may prove, as was the work of Aquinas to the High Middle Ages, to be the foundation of a new "civilization of love."

I will be praying daily for the complete "incarnation" and inculturation of John Paul's synthesis of faith and life, expressed wonderfully in his Christian personalism and his many teachings and gestures that echo it. May it be so... through the intercession of Saint and Doctor, Pope John Paul the Great, more than a prophet. Amen.