On Friday this week Pope John Paul II celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his election. The achievement of this remarkable Pope, the first non-Italian for four and a half centuries, is examined by a well-known Vatican observer in Rome. THE first Slav pope in history, and the first non-Italian since 1522, John Paul II has dedicated his pontificate to pushing out the frontiers of the Catholic Church beyond its Western matrix. Through his international journeys and his exercise of the teaching authority, the magisterium, at every level, he has shown a constant concern to present the Church as a saving power in the global market-place. Hence the new evangelisation which he called for, and his focus on the theme of the third millennium.

Any summing up of the 20 years of this pontificate ? the longest in the twentieth century ? must of necessity be provisional. When he was elected on 16 October 1978, Karol Wojtyla spoke of his sense of being a providential choice. Now was the time to overcome the legacy of the treaty of Yalta, which divided Europe into east and west whereas in fact the whole continent breathes with both lungs. It was time too for a more vigorous and universal definition of the Christian mission in the world. He has never ceased to put the Church forward as the fount of civilisation, the mediator of ethics that converge around fundamental human rights and values, in the face of the drift of secularised society and the inadequacy of its models.

Do not be afraid. Open the doors to Christ. Such was the call he made in his inaugural address. This was not just a suggestive slogan, but a plan of action. It declared that his pontificate would challenge modern society, in open opposition to the liberal assumption that religion can be relegated to the private sphere. On his journey to the tomb of St Francis in Assisi on 5 November 1978 ? the first of the journeys he was to make to at least 170 countries ? this conviction was confirmed: Our age is waiting for Christ with the greatest anxiety. It is preparing for the rebirth of Christ.

John Paul's output of magisterial teaching has been abundant. From his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, to his 1994 letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente about the celebrations for the year 2000, the common thread is the theme of a new Advent. Such ideas have been constantly emphasised throughout the entire pontificate. We can fairly conclude that they have had a key role in determining the pope's commitment to a militant missionary attitude aimed at restoring the power of Christianity in civil society, though also open to ecumenism and dialogue with the great world religions.

Undeniably, however, a call to modern society to recognise the public status of religion involves a highly ambiguous note. For these are the typical ideas of the centuries-old theological and ecclesiastical system of the past, which had at its heart the vision of a society based on religion. In his inaugural address Wojtyla asked that the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilisation and development should be opened to Christ's saving power. This language echoed the plan for Christian reconquest which had dominated the papacies of Pius X, Pius XI and Pius XII in the first half of the twentieth century. Such a platform seemed to have exhausted its function with the break-up of Christendom in the 1970s and 1980s and with the new directions of the Second Vatican Council.

Wojtyla's pontificate introduced certain characteristics from the national Catholic Polish model: a stress on identity, charisma and missionary drive. There was clearly a defensive motivation here, which at the extreme lends itself for use by intransigent elements in Catholic culture, being obviously sympathetic to zealous confessional movements such as those which march under the banner of Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, the Charismatic Movement and so on.

Leanings towards restoration and against reform have appeared again in the Catholic Church. They are supported by a reinforcement of the power of the Roman Curia, an unwarranted extension of the power of jurisdiction of the papal primacy, and an unprecedented expansion of the political and diplomatic system of the Holy See. The claim that society should be ruled by sacred directives has been relaunched, and a process of clericalisation set in train that could not have been foreseen after the reforms of Vatican II.

The conclusion of Ulrich Ruh, writing about the pontificate in L'Actualit? Religieuse in 1995, appears well founded. John Paul II, he says, is not clearly the Pope of a restoration in the Church and in society, even if part of the Church and public opinion thinks of him like that. But there is a contradiction inherent in his concept of the Church, and this has encouraged those forces and groups in the Roman Curia and among bishops, clergy and laity who see the salvation of the Church above all in loyalty to the magisterium, in the strongest possible central control, and in a return to the forms of traditional piety. Ruh concludes that the Pope's efforts to promote a new dynamic of evangelisation in the hierarchical structure and through a strong witness have their limitations, as has clearly now been shown.

One must remember, on the other hand, that the Pope found himself managing the most valuable bequest of the Second Vatican Council and of Paul VI ? the dialogue between the Church and the modern world ? just at the moment when the very concept of modernity was coming under attack from within its own ranks. So John Paul II, with the support of his strong man in the Vatican, the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, took a turn towards an anti-modern stance which became tougher as he became more aware of forces which were besieging his Church and threatening to scatter it.

It was not easy for the Pope to steer the ship of Peter in this stormy weather. He had played a part in pulling down the Berlin Wall, but he had to recognise that this had not brought any closer the reconciliation of East and West, which is one of his greatest hopes. Furthermore, he soon showed disquiet at the development of democratic processes which he himself had helped to bring into being, but which he did not want. Not only were the post-Communist societies overwhelmed by moral disorder and a radical liberalism derived from the West, but the Church found it hard to define its own place in a pluralistic society. Accepting a situation of dialogue meant being one voice amongst the others, and trying to obtain support for the values in which it believed without demanding assent on the basis of its own authority.

When Communism collapsed, the idea of a tightly-knit Catholicism seemed to have collapsed with it. But the Roman Church was slow to draw its own lessons from the end of the Communist empire: that the herd mentality should be resisted, pluralism and responsible dissent valued, and processes encouraged to allow the participation of the faithful and recognise the primacy of their conscience.

Instead, in post-Communist society the Church has preferred to wield the classical apparatus of power: seven apostolic nunciatures (the one in Moscow dating from 1990), agreements with states, concordats, requests for the return of confiscated church property. New Catholic episcopal sees have been set up in regions that have traditionally been Orthodox (including an apostolic administration in Moscow), in contravention of an established tradition that episcopal sees should not be superimposed in the territory of sister Churches. The Orthodox Churches in Russia and Ukraine complained that over-zealous Catholic groups and movements had invaded their countries and were active in proselytising, in spite of ecumenical agreements signed at Balamand in Lebanon by the bilateral commission for dialogue between Rome and the Orthodox world.

The Roman critique of ethical relativism and religious individualism, together with a drive towards a reconstructed intellectual, doctrinal and disciplinary Catholic uniformity, became part and parcel of the confessional perspectives of the Polish Pope.

His missionary design was bolstered by his genial personality and his unquenchable dynamism, his way of reaching out, extending the map of his Church to the last unexplored corners of the earth, But all this seemed a throwback to the age-old theological system of the Roman Curia, which the Second Vatican Council had been unable or unwilling to tackle at its roots. Indeed, one could see the system gaining ground the more the Slav Pope preferred to dedicate himself to missionary work rather than to government.

The encyclicals Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Evangelium Vitae (1995) provided a systematic framework to the Pope's concern for a humanity which had lost its bearings. The Church offered its own lifebelts to a century that was adrift. It proposed a reconstruction of morality and morale, by filling up the gap left by the defeated messianic promises of liberalism and Communism.

Especially after the end of Soviet Communism, a major part of Wojtyla's programme was to put forward the ethical substitutes the Church could offer for outdated ideologies and for systems which put their faith in efficiency and were now in crisis. Even if John Paul II's real influence on the events in Poland from 1979 to 1983 was less than people said it was, nevertheless he has subsequently played an openly critical role towards the liberal democracies, denouncing the contradictions and dangers which arise when primacy is given to economic and bureaucratic considerations. The encyclical Centesimus Annus of 1991 is one eloquent witness to his effort to show that the market forces of global capitalism need to be ordered ethically.

The language of Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors, denouncing the modern age, had been sent to the scrapheap, but its basic reasoning has been recycled. The thesis was that only the Church had the secret of a doctrine of humanity that could solve the contradictions of modernity and thus put universal values and the rights of the human person on a stable basis. Wojtyla's Church declared itself the bearer of salvation for humanity, the sole guarantor of future survival. Turning upside down the assumptions of liberalism, Jozef Ratzinger maintained that the Catholic Church was the only institution capable of adequately solving the crisis of identity and legitimacy from which political society was suffering.

Given these premises, it was inevitable that the structural model of the Church worked out under John XXIII and Paul VI should come in for revision. No longer was the Church's vision so dominated by the desire to announce the Gospel in its original sense, to promote Christianity as a leaven in the lump, and to suggest the theme of the Church of the poor. Rather, what now counted was the success of the Church in a world-wide social and ethical role. This was, as it were, fundamentalism expressed in action, with all the necessary tools from concordats to an updated social doctrine, from television satellites to a presence on the international political scene.

Vatican diplomacy as a result developed on an unprecedented scale: where there were 89 nunciatures and 21 apostolic delegations in 1978, there are now 167 representatives of the Holy See in as many countries, in addition to the 18 apostolic delegations and 24 offices attached to international organisations. In the early years of the pontificate, the Holy See's mediation between Chile and Argentina in the dispute over the Beagle Channel indicated a general line of policy: the papacy was reviving the prerogatives of its political sovereignty, to the point of recovering the function of arbiter it had played in the Middle Ages. The Pope was now considered, as at the time of Boniface VIII, to be the judge of princes as much in the temporal as the spiritual field. Papal missions were sent to the international hot spots. In the crisis in the Balkans at the end of 1991 the Holy See found itself involved in the process of the break-up of the Yugoslav federation, having been precipitate in recognising the new sovereign states, in comparison with its traditional caution. In 1993 the Pope himself tried to limit the damage caused by this political mistake with an ecumenical prayer at Assisi for peace in the Balkans, although the Orthodox Serbs chose not to take part in this initiative.

The reassertion of the Church as a power in the world was incompatible with the priority of ecumenical dialogue, but now, more than a century after the fall of the papal states and the ending of the temporal sovereignty of the pope-emperor, a new papal centralism took centre-stage. It updates the claims of the papacy under Gregory the Great that the pope should be a monarch outside the system. Though it had given up its own political power, the Church reorganised itself in terms of a symbolic sovereignty exercised through mobilising the masses. This papal monarchy would now exert a pastoral role in marketplaces and stadiums packed with prayerful crowds in every country on earth, through a systematic use of the media and a strong emphasis upon its role in global political ethics.

Some had dreamt of a pope who would feel at ease in some Latin American or African slum, take a taxi incognito in Paris or live permanently in Jerusalem, having abandoned the Vatican. Instead the papacy of John Paul II, with his international journeys, achieved a global outreach and a foothold in the international media. The ceremonial chair and the Renaissance tiara were replaced by the satellite dish. To be concluded next week.

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