The pope at the UN.

As reported ahead of time in these pages ["Caped Crusader Conquers Gotham," October 6], John Paul II swept New Yorkers and just about everyone else within reach of a TV off their feet during his whirlwind and rainsoaked visit. Youthful seminarians were heard to gush about John Paul's resemblance to Jesus, admiring rabbis crowned him a mensch, and even hard-bitten journalists anointed him the "most charismatic man in the world." Just one of the intriguing paradoxes surrounding the pope is his mastery of the media event, a celebrity-driven spectacle that he himself might dismiss as a symptom of the "culture of death" in other contexts.

But as the pope advises, we must get beyond the pomp and the glitz to the substance of things. Happily, John Paul is indeed a mensch, and seldom short on substance. At a time when mean-spiritedness toward the disadvantaged seems to dominate American politics, John Paul vigorously urged us to live up to our better selves. He implored us to care for and respect the poor and to welcome and value the immigrant. He quoted Lincoln on the moral foundations of society, and reminded Americans of our obligations to the unborn and of materialism's delusions and snares. Most important, in his address to the UN, the centerpiece of his trip, John Paul issued a ringing affirmation both of the UN itself and of individual freedom and cultural pluralism. John Paul's UN address also offered a careful exegesis of freedom's dependence on human solidarity and international cooperation. It was a speech worthy of a pope who so palpably longs for world peace and unity as the millennium approaches.

To be sure, there is no shortage of broad conceptual visions for how humankind should act and how the world ought to work. Getting the peoples of the world to move, as the pope eloquently urged, from a reliance on coercion to a faith in persuasion is admittedly the harder part. Still, this pope brings a rare authority to what might otherwise seem like mere diplomatic protocol. That authority rests on several factors. His personal sanctity and self-discipline, his honest regard for "the other," his travels to every part of the globe, win him a respectful hearing in precincts ready to dismiss lofty language and abstract formulas. His sophisticated philosophical thinking, married to an outspoken faith, produce an undeniable gravitas. But most compelling, perhaps, is the richness of his personal experience. When this Polish pope, a witness, as he noted, of the depredations of nazism and communism, speaks of the universal yearning for freedom, the inviolable dignity of the individual, and the right of peoples and nations to self-determination, we hear a voice that speaks with both authority and authenticity.

John Paul's UN speech often evoked what many regard as the most humanizing political experience of this century, Eastern Europe's peaceful "Velvet Revolution" of 1989. "The politics of nations," he told the UN in words that could have been Vaclav Havel's, "can never ignore the transcendent, spiritual dimension of the human experience....Whatever diminishes man--whatever shortens the horizon of man's aspirations to goodness--harms the cause of freedom."

What is remarkable about the pope's rhetoric was the effort to seek a kind of common language that is both faithful to Catholic principles and yet forges a bridge to those who might be suspicious of any specifically Christian philosophical idiom. Indeed, throughout John Paul's speech he acknowledged the vital "tension [that exists] between the particular and the universal," between the spiritual aspirations and inherent dignity of all people and the specific, multifarious cultures that give unique expression to our humanity.

Because we recognize that all people share an inalienable human dignity, the pope said, we must protect the rights of all, especially of the poor and helpless. He questioned the economic utilitarianism of advanced societies and championed the good of "weaker nations." Such enormous disparities in wealth "offend the conscience of humanity." The UN has a large role to play in alleviating economic and other inequalities, and "needs to rise more and more above the cold status of an administrative institution and to become a moral center where all nations of the world feel at home."

In that context, the pope strongly defended the practical significance of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calling it "one of the hightest expressions of the human conscience in our time."

At the same time, John Paul recognized that human existence is limited by place and time. Thus, we must respect different cultures, since "every culture is an effort to ponder the mystery of the world and in particular of the human person: it is a way of giving expression to the transcendent dimension of human life."

How are we to make sense of these apparently conflicting truths? This is the perpetual challenge. John Paul's speech exemplified the absolute commitment to both human dignity and to a respect for human differences that keeps that "vital tension" alive.