A man of great faith.

Byline: The Register-Guard

One day after Pope John Paul II's death Saturday at age 84, we see only parts of the whole man, mostly those we wish to see - the world traveler, the charismatic leader, the linguist, the athlete, the scholar, the defender of human dignity. The world remembers these aspects of John Paul II's life with admiration, yet his legacy is a complicated one. He was at once orthodox and revolutionary, and his message was one that should disturb the comfort of everyone but a saint.

John Paul II certainly revolutionized the papacy. In 1978 Karol Woytyla became the first Pole to be elected pope, and the first non-Italian in nearly half a millennium. He personalized the papacy, merging the office and the man in a way no one before him had done. He was the first pope to perform a marriage. He visited more than 130 countries, 30 of them repeatedly, in a literal response to Jesus's command to "preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth."

John Paul II revolutionized the Catholic Church. He approved the first new catechism in 430 years, and added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary. By example and through his writings, he energized the church's devotion to Mary. By virtue of his longevity - he was the third-longest-serving pope in history - he remade the church hierarchy through the appointment of most of the bishops and cardinals now serving. He beatified more people, and canonized more saints, than any pope before him.

John Paul II revolutionized the church's standing in relation to other religions and to its own history. He embraced Jewish people as "our older brothers" and apologized for the church's mistreatment of Jews. He was the first pope to pray in a mosque. He attempted to heal the 1,000-year rift with the Eastern church. He apologized for the church's condemnation of Galileo, for the crusades and for the Inquisition.

And John Paul II revolutionized the world. He became pope a decade before the Berlin Wall fell, and visited his native Poland eight months later. "You are men. You have dignity. Don't crawl on your bellies," he said at one stop. John Paul II insisted that the Soviet Union's material and moral exhaustion would have led to its eventual collapse. Yet both Lech Walesa, head of the Polish Solidarity union, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, now say that without John Paul II the end would not have come so soon or so peacefully.

At the same time, John Paul II was profoundly orthodox, traditional, conservative - all those words apply. He frustrated those who wished to see the Catholic Church accommodate its doctrines to the modern world. He opposed a larger role for women in the church, refused to loosen church positions on contraception and homosexuality, and insisted on the dignity of all human life in matters ranging from abortion to stem cell research. In an era defined by relativism, John Paul II kept his eyes fixed on the absolute.

There was no contradiction between John Paul II's orthodoxy and his revolutionary papacy. The Gospels, after all, are profoundly radical, and the 2,000-year-old institution charged with their defense and propagation has developed time-tested doctrines. John Paul II's life work was to harness the latter in service of the former.

The resulting message is one that ought to shake the complacency of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. John Paul II opposed communism - but he opposed the materialism from which it arose even more, and believed that capitalism shares many of the same faults. He deplored the triumph of an economic system that promotes self-gratification, exploitation and spiritual emptiness. He demanded to know how history would judge a generation that had the means to feed the world but did not.

John Paul II's energy, humility and faith have set an unmatched standard. The world will not see another like him soon.