From Him, the Essential Spark : Pope: It was John Paul II who provided the spiritual will for Eastern Europe’s transformation. He made the Catholic faith stand for something.

The man who did more than any other to shape the 1980s, Pope John Paul II, is also the undersung hero of the revolutions of 1989. The first Pope to have endured years living under communism, he has lived to see it humbled.

It was touching to see the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party come to this Pope to pay him homage. Many have not forgotten that in 1981, John Paul lay near death from the bullets of a would-be assassin. Or that he later visited the convicted assassin in his cell to express a word of comfort and forgiveness. And that he never publicly accused those who had planned his death.

What was Pope John Paul II thinking, then, as he accepted the highly dramatic visit of Mikhail S. Gorbachev? I wonder if he asked himself, “How many divisions does Gorbachev have? And for how long?”

Not many months ago, John Paul urgently wanted to visit the Ukraine and perhaps also Catholic Lithuania, which has suffered fierce oppression. In 1988, had he been been permitted, he would happily have celebrated 1,000 years of the preaching of the Christian Gospel in Kiev.

Now, in the presence of the Soviet leader, the Pope was in a position to refuse to visit the Ukraine until full religious liberty has been restored there and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. He listened intently as Gorbachev praised the indispensable role of religion in revitalizing the moribund communist system.

The Pope has spoken publicly, incessantly and in every part of the world about the leitmotif of his papacy: the primacy of the human spirit. In 1989, a world of skeptics saw that primacy in the face of barbed wire, walls and guns.

When many others had seemed to give up hope during the days of martial law in Poland in 1981, John Paul II began planning earnestly to visit his homeland as Pope. With his encouragement, in eight short years the leaders of Poland’s Solidarity rose from prisons and detention camps to Parliament. This achievement would not have been conceivable without the steady presence of the Polish Pope, outside the walls of the Iron Curtain, holding the attention of the world.

I do not mean to underestimate the role played by President Reagan in putting the struggle against communism into spiritual and moral terms, in rallying the malaise-ridden spirit of the West and in demonstrating to the Soviets two important realities: that Marxism would soon be swept into “the dustbin of history,” and that the West would begin to turn back the previously unchecked advance of Marxist power around the world.

Nor do I wish to underestimate the role of Mikhail Gorbachev, who had the intelligence and courage to face these facts and who took the indispensable steps to save what could be saved of communism. Reagan applied the pressing weight of these realities from outside, and Gorbachev recognized them from within.

Nonetheless, the crucial missing element, which neither of these men could generate alone, was the spiritual will of the peoples of Eastern Europe to claim their inalienable rights and to exert their irresistible “people power.” Emboldened by the decade-long example of the Pope’s beloved Solidarity (led by an electrician from Gdansk), one by one the peoples of Eastern Europe awakened to the inner power that John Paul II had shown was theirs. They withheld their consent to be governed, and the dreadful juggernaut of communism crumbled at its core.

In John Paul II, the Catholic faith came to stand for something vital, challenging, bracing. For, in addition to “the primacy of the spiritual,” he articulated three other compelling messages. Each of these has roots in the Gospel, but each also has political force.

The first of these messages was that Europe is a tree with two main branches, East and West. Its roots are one. Despite appearances, the wall dividing Europe represented an illusion and was doomed.

His second message was that the first of all human rights is the right to religious liberty. For each human being is made in the image of God. Each is free to reflect and to choose. Each is responsible. In this responsibility lies human dignity.

His third message was that the only political system that seems to allow this inherent liberty to express itself in time and space is democracy. It is not enough to have spiritual liberty; people must be free to express themselves publicly in worldly structures and systems. Among such systems, democracy is assuredly flawed, like all things human. Yet no other system protects human rights as well. Democracy means not majority rule alone, but also the protection of human rights, including the rights of the unborn. The social revolution, the Pope thinks, is moral--or else it is incomplete.

The name of Pope John Paul II will live forever as one of the 10 greatest popesof history. His legend will grow. Seldom has a Pope been so blessed as to see so many of the seeds he sowed take such solidroot and ripen in so full a harvest within his own lifetime. He has seen great changes occur in Eastern Europe, in the Philippines, in Chile, in Africa and elsewhere.

Pope John Paul II has made many enemies in the brief 11 years since his accession. Let them take warning. What this man sows, he reaps. What he teaches takes root. Not through his power, of course, but that of the Word he obeys.

A thousand years from now, the Vatican meeting between John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev is likely to be bearing fruit in the Ukraine, Lithuania and elsewhere in the Eastern branch of Christianity. A thousand years, not a year or even a decade, is the proper time span for measuring the achievement of a pope. In many centuries, the world has not seen his like.

At the end of the new film “Henry V,” Henry’s victorious troops sing a prayer of thanksgiving that fits this occasion perfectly:

Non nobis, Domine, sed Nomine Tuo, da Gloriam.

“Not to us, Lord, but to Thy Name, the glory.”

What he set out to do in 1978 has come to pass beyond Pope John Paul II’s dreams. The world has changed dramatically. One day, parents will tell their children of him.