John Cornwell’s Seminary Boy is a vividly recalled but impersonal journey to the inevitable destination shared by all memoirs about leaving the fold. Mr. Cornwell, born in London in 1940 to a family that could ill afford another child, entered a Midlands seminary at the age of 13 and, five years later, after transferring to a senior seminary, gave up the idea of entering the priesthood in favor of a life in academia. (These days, Mr. Cornwell directs the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge.)

This apostasy is brought on by the usual causes: an inability to reconcile intellectual curiosity and a normal sexual appetite with the strictures of the Catholic Church; the growing conviction that life required something more engaged than the bloodless detachment of the seminary; and just being sick and tired of constant acquiescence to authority, no matter how petty.

If Mr. Cornwell is willing at first to submit to all that, it’s because religious education saved him from much worse: not just from poverty but from the vicious little thug he was on his way to becoming. His delinquency went well beyond rebellion; he was an incipient sociopath. Only the fortuitous appearance of the police prevented him and his gang from derailing a train by placing an iron girder on the track. And there’s worse: He tells of luring a girl into a bomb shelter and holding her down while he and his friends put their hands down her pants. “She was in my class at school and she had earlier shown a liking for me,” Mr. Cornwell writes. “She looked at me in silent sorrow as I urged the others on.” And he himself was abused, raped by a stranger he met in an underground subway passage on one of his surreptitious trips into London.

Given all that, you can understand why a place at a seminary school might seem a godsend—literally. And Mr. Cornwell was treated considerably better than many of the Catholic Church’s other charges (his experience with sexual abuse taught him to rebuff one priest’s clumsy pass). He was also, quite simply, susceptible to religion’s visceral appeal: Taking part in church ritual, he writes, “calmed me and soothed me.”

Seminary Boy dependably contains the descriptions of bad food and primitive lodging that have been the staple of accounts of English boarding-school life since Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.” Mr. Cornwell’s account of his first meal at the seminary gets at the combination of pointless discipline and soul-crushing dreariness that would define his life there:

“The boys were standing in silence, hands joined. Near the double doors there was a table where three nuns stood with ladles poised over enamel serving pans. After Father McCartie said grace we sat down while the students assigned to be servers queued in front of the nuns. Each boy received a portion of beans and a hunk of bread. They fell hungrily on the food, eating at speed. After several minutes there was a sharp rap as Father McCartie struck the serving table, and the boys began to talk all at once.

“James said: ‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’ No sooner had I answered and begun to tell James about my home parish than Father McCartie rapped the table again and the boys fell silent and stood up, heads bowed for grace.”

There’s an unintended irony in the presence of the word “grace” anywhere near this graceless existence, and it hints at the unintentional contradiction at the heart of Seminary Boy.

Mr. Cornwell writes as if the gray, cheerless drudgery he encountered were an affront to the very idea of a loving Christ, and he’s not wrong. His description of his home parish (probably a good deal sharper than what he told his friend James) is a definition of religion as soul-starving ritual. His priest, driven by poverty, ekes out the instruments of the mass so sparingly that, at funerals, “the charcoal was a morsel of white ash by the time we reached the graveside.” This note-perfect detail can stand for all: “At Low Mass he would ease a teardrop of wine into the chalice.”

In part, this is merely the minginess of poverty, and we all know that a degree of pageantry embellishes the Mass in wealthier parishes. But Mr. Cornwell can’t quite bring himself to admit that the flinty rituals of his home parish are also an expression of the self-denying, comfort-withholding Catholic Church.

Though Seminary Boy is ostensibly the story behind John Cornwell’s eventual realization that “the shape of human history … depended … on the responsibilities of individuals and groups,” he can’t bring himself to discard “all that accumulated religious experience.” There’s a further twist to the tale.

He writes, “This is not the place for the narrative of a life journey that, twenty years on, would find me a returning Catholic—except to say that my marriage to a Catholic woman, and the birth of our children whom she brought up as Catholics, kept the spark of faith alive in me.” Why is this not the place? Because it would utterly contradict the journey Seminary Boy describes?

Plenty in Mr. Cornwell’s later experience must have confirmed for him the arrogance and disdain for the outside world that led him to leave the church in the first place: His other books include histories of Pope Pius XII’s coziness with fascists and Pope John Paul II’s intransigence on social issues. And he’s of course aware of the revelations of sexual abuse and church cover-ups, and the church’s use of unwed mothers as slave labor in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries (ditto the child evacuees from England in Australia during World War II). He must know, too, that the church refuses to moderate its views on contraception though it has an enormous influence in Africa, where AIDS is rampant.

This may not be the place for a narrative of Mr. Cornwell’s later life, but if that later life seems to contradict both his own experience and certain damning historical facts, then Seminary Boy is less a spiritual and intellectual journey than a U-turn—it’s the story of how John Cornwell discovered a way back into that club that didn’t want him in the first place.

Charles Taylor has written for Salon, The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He’s a frequent contributor to The Observer.

With the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the 265th Bishop of Rome, one New York priest joked that he'd sent a similar message to an American colleague at the Vatican: "Avoid the rush and check into Regina Coeli now."

Regina Coeli is the oldest and most notorious prison in Rome, the Eternal City's answer to the Tombs. And while even a Jesuit wouldn't seriously suggest that Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, will be putting dissidents into jail cells, there's no question that the new Papacy will further crack down on those who stray from or even question church orthodoxy.

That is bound to have a profound effect on the Catholic Church in the United States, where, in the last two weeks alone, verboten issues like women's ordination, married clergy, divorce and birth control have been argued heatedly on cable television and talk radio. While even a Pope with Cardinal Ratzinger's forceful personality can't control who says what on CNN or MSNBC (his influence over Fox News remains to be seen), he certainly can control dialogue within church circles.

"I think this is a catastrophe for the church in the United States," said novelist Peter Quinn, who is active in his church in Hastings, N.Y., and writes frequently on Catholic topics. "He is so focused on orthodoxy that he can't see the bigger picture. The changes brought about in the Second Vatican Council, which showed how the church could adapt to the modern world, are not part of this Pope's agenda.

"[Historian] Lord Macaulay once said that the American Constitution was all sail and no anchor. Now the Catholic Church is all anchor and no sail."

During the bulk of John Paul II's reign, Cardinal Ratzinger served as the Vatican's answer to Dick Cheney. Devoid of charisma, at least in public, and with a reputation as a ferocious enforcer of dogma, Cardinal Ratzinger was neither warm nor fuzzy, befitting his place in the Vatican bureaucracy. Since 1981, Cardinal Ratzinger had been the prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an office formerly known as the Inquisition.

The new Pope certainly has his supporters-in fact, there's a Cardinal Ratzinger fan club on the Web, where adherents gather to cheer on his enthusiastic upholding of Catholic doctrine. And one of New York's most prominent Catholic priests, the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, seemed well pleased with the choice as he co-anchored Vatican coverage for the EWTN cable network. The network is often referred to as "the Catholic channel," although its point of view-that the liberalizing effects of the Second Vatican Council have caused the Church untold ruin-is hardly universal.

But it certainly would seem to square with the new Pope's sentiments, as well as those of the dozens of bishops appointed during the closing years of John Paul II's Papacy. Generally, they have been dogmatic conservatives with a dim view of lay opinion. In fact, the archbishop of Newark, John J. Myers, has suggested that he would lose little sleep if the American Catholic Church shrank in numbers, as long as that shrinkage produced a purer, more orthodox Church. Archbishop Myers took the unusual step last year of banning a lay organization called Voice of the Faithful, even though it didn't actually exist within his jurisdiction.

"When Pope Paul IV was elected in 1555, Ignatius Loyola [founder of the Jesuits] said he shook to his very bones," Mr. Quinn said, referring to a Pope who would go on to further empower the Inquisition and dole out patronage to his allies. "Well, there's a lot of shaking going on right now among liberal and moderate Catholics-not from fear, but from anguish. John Paul II was a Catholic reactionary with a human face, but now the human face is gone."

Too Pessimistic?

Mr. Quinn's sentiments, whispered even by some priests, may be unduly pessimistic-or so hopes Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal, the Catholic journal of opinion based on the Upper West Side.

"It's hard to predict what sort of Pope he will be based on his position at the C.D.F.," Mr. Baumann said. "There, he was essentially the church's head theologian, and that was an intellectually and in some ways lawyerly job. Now, as Pope, he is in a pastoral position, which calls for a different set of skills and different energies."

One thing seems certain, according to some church observers: Don't expect Benedict XVI to be as quick as his predecessor to visit New York.

John Paul II visited here in 1979, about a year after his election. His immediate predecessor, John Paul I, didn't get the chance to visit, dying after a mere month in office. Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978, traveled to New York in 1965 to celebrate Mass at Yankee Stadium and deliver a passionate anti-war speech at the United Nations. Paul's New York visit was a milestone in Papal history: It was the first time a Pope had visited the United States.

But it was John Paul who captivated the city during two memorable visits.

"New Yorkers warmed enormously to John Paul II, but my impression is that the new Pope doesn't have the charisma, the outsized personality, of a John Paul II," said Mr. Baumann. "That will make it harder for New Yorkers to figure him out. Benedict will travel, of course, but he doesn't strike me as the showman John Paul was. Benedict spent most of his time in one academic setting or the other."

And the academy may prove to be the setting for one of the new Pope's first battles, some church observers said. Critics, including the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law, have questioned the Catholic identity of institutions such as Boston College, a Jesuit school, and other colleges and universities. Early on in his pontificate, John Paul cracked down on American theologians like the Reverend Charles Curran, whose teachings strayed from the Vatican line on sexual ethics. Numerous Catholic college presidents and academics feared for the Catholic tradition of inquiry when John Paul called on local bishops to approve the hiring of theology professors. And just last year, Seton Hall University's law school came under fire when students presented Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sister of Donald Trump, with the school's Sandra Day O'Connor Award. Both Justice O'Connor and Judge Barry had issued opinions in favor of abortion rights. Archbishop Myers said he found the students' action to be "profoundly offensive," and he questioned the school's commitment to its "Catholic identity."

As John Paul's enforcer on these issues, Benedict XVI figures to further clamp down on U.S. Catholics who believe that the imperial Papacy has betrayed the promise of collegiality and inquiry offered by the Second Vatican Council.

They wonder if they'll ever again see the extraordinary spectacle that unfolded on cable television in the days after John Paul II's death, when conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, a self-appointed expert in Catholic doctrine, was on the receiving end of lectures by a nun, Sister Joan Chittister, and a priest, the Reverend James Martin, an associate editor of America magazine.

Mr. Buchanan argued that changes such as the ordination of women were impossible because Catholic doctrine never changed. The nun and the priest countered by pointing out how often church doctrine did, in fact, change.

Few of those changes, however, took place when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the Vatican's chief of doctrine. And fewer still can be expected during the reign of Benedict XVI.

The world had more worlds in it as recently as a century ago. My mother-in-law died last year, age 92. When she was born, the emperor of China had only just been deposed. The Ottoman Empire was ruled by a sultan who was also caliph-commander of the faithful. Kaisers ruled the German and Austro-Hungarian empires; the Russian Empire was ruled by a czar. While she was still a girl, all these were swept away.

The etiquette of the Papacy is more democratic than it once was, but the Pope still stands out among world leaders. Consider his wardrobe: Most heads of state could slip into a board meeting, or a banquette at Michael's, without causing a ripple. Not the Pope. If clothes make the man, then unmodern clothes make an unmodern man.

The day after the Pope's funeral, one of the last hereditary monarchies was having a much worse time of it. The wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles looked for all the world like one of those tacky-pretentious affairs we've all seen, leaving an Upper East Side church in a carriage drawn by a white horse painted with black spots. Was it for this that Alfred fought the Danes, that Charles I went calmly to the block, or that Edward VIII felt obliged to abdicate?

In 1981, when Prince Charles married the first time, Britain rolled out all the considerable pageantry it could muster. The monarchy had had no real power for many years. But it was still felt to be an indispensable element in the somewhat irrational system of the British state-a channel of historical continuity, a symbolic limit to plebiscitary fiat, a reserve of dignity for a nation now great mostly in the past tense, but still not to be written off. The grim farce of Charles, Diana and Camilla, and the looming encore of Harry and William, reduce the House of Windsor to a reality-TV show. Joan Rivers was invited to the wedding; why not Anna Nicole Smith?

For an instance of government-making as it is now done, look at Iraq, where Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Jalal Talabani were sworn in as interim prime minister and president, respectively. Saddam Hussein reportedly watched the proceedings from his cell. The Holy Spirit and royal genes have been replaced by the choice of the people. (Partisans of both monarchy and democracy sometimes claim that the Holy Spirit guides their systems, but that would take us into theology.) The fashion is so universal that even murderous brutes like Saddam, Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro ape it, claiming to be ratified in electoral charades. But Iraq is going through the real thing.

How long it took them to reach this point, and how many doubted their progress. Iraq's ethnic tensions would shiver the country into fragments. The insurgents commanded the loyalty-or the fear-of most Iraqis. January's elections would have to be postponed in order to woo the Sunni Arabs. The bickering of the interim National Assembly after January's vote would cause the brave, purple-fingered electorate to lose confidence. But Iraq and America persisted.

For what? Demagogy, rent-seeking, obscurantism, incompetence-all the features of democratic life that we know from the Christian Coalition, the AARP, the Supreme Court and the New York City Council. But in the welter, people will have a say in ruling themselves, and, equally important, will feel that they have a say in ruling themselves. It is a recognition of what Rousseau called amour de soi, and what John Paul II called the dignity of the person. Added bonus: Uday and Qusay will do less raping.

All these political systems, ancient and modern, conduct their business under the eye, at once saturnine and hysterical, of the media. Who creates the media? The people themselves, with their appetite for news and stimulation. Who writes the stories? A billion hacks, from Bill Keller to frothblog.com, not one of them as responsible to the public as the lowliest clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Media is the dark twin of democracy, never separated since birth.

The last Pope, as Bono said, was the best front man the Catholic Church ever had. Will the inevitable failure of his successor to match up cause a reaction to an office and a church lifted, this last quarter of a century, to rock 'n' roll heights?

Ask the Windsors. They tried to play the media game, flaunting their drum-and-trumpets trappings while doling out selected bits of humanizing information to what they imagined might be a controllable press. In sweet, shy Diana Spencer, they seemed to have hit the jackpot. Now, after the bulimia and the tampons and the tears, the wind blows through the wreckage of what they once were.

How cruelly the media cuffs Iraq, and our efforts there. Before the fall of Saddam, all they offered-apart from John Burns-were opaque Baathist press releases. Now that everything can be known, everything bad is known. The daily wire is a parade of bombs, raids and kidnappings. The think pieces recycle a perverse Orientalism of turbulent darkies, unknowable and ungovernable.

But sometimes the media bites the bad guys, too. On the eve of the January elections, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi unwisely issued a declaration of "bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to enact it." So Osama bin Laden, the self-anointed Saudi-Yemeni caliph, and Mr. al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian emir of the Land of the Two Rivers, were telling Iraqis to stay home and obey them. Bad move. Human pride, human ignorance and the omnivorous amorality of those who write about them are in a three-legged race for the years and decades ahead.

But it is wiser not to pretend to comprehend him too quickly. Although deeply involved in the political struggles of his time, he wasn't a politician who could be easily categorized in simple monochromatic terms. Behind the images of the warm pastor and the global celebrity were the intellectual and the mystic. In struggling to both adapt and defend an ancient faith, he was complicated and sometimes contradictory.

John Paul II did not belong exclusively to "right" or "left," regardless of the rhetorical tributes accorded him in the pages of the New York Post and other doctrinal journals. Such self-serving ideological diatribes shouldn't affect his legacy and only tend to dishonor those who make them. Within his prolific writings and his stewardship of the church can be found the traces of both conservative and progressive influences, as might be expected from a European who spent his early life in struggle against Nazism and then Communism.

That duality was evident in his willingness to confront the decadent Soviet empire that had so long oppressed his homeland-by encouraging a worker uprising that signaled the beginning of the end of Communist oppression. As a lifelong advocate of labor rights, he didn't fit so perfectly with the right-wingers who sought to appropriate his courage for their own ends-and whose hostility to labor was so antithetical to his philosophy.

Unlike his brave confrontation with Communism, however, John Paul II soon found that he lacked the means to effect real change in the capitalist juggernaut. His sermons on the dignity of work and the imperative to care for the poor went largely ignored by corporate and national leaders. As he observed growing inequality, he came to feel that "the exploitation produced by inhuman capitalism is a real evil," and even suggested that he saw a "kernel of truth in Marxism."

Indeed, following the first decade of his long Papacy, the most troubling problems faced by John Paul II were caused not by crumbling Communist regimes but by the triumphant, globalizing, omnipotent market, uprooting old cultures, implanting materialism and promoting secularism. In both its progressive and conservative manifestations, his reign can be seen as a response to those forces.

The Pope's determination to enforce outdated restrictions on sexuality and his protests against unrestrained capitalism arose from the same impulse-as did his autocratic approach to new reformist and radical ideas within the church itself.

His administration of the church empowered the most reactionary bishops and lay orders, notably including the wealthy, secretive and authoritarian Opus Dei. A sincere apostle of freedom, human rights and democracy, he nevertheless came perilously close to imitating his old Communist enemies in promoting a group that bans books and exercises daily control over its members. Yet he and his allies were unable to suppress the increasing restlessness among Western Catholics over prohibitions against women's ordination, priestly marriage, birth control within marriage and tolerance of homosexuality.

He assiduously sought to enfold these encyclicals within a consistent "gospel of life" that rejected war and capital punishment as well as stem-cell research and euthanasia. But the more rigid aspects of his philosophy were hard to justify as millions turned away from the church-and millions more suffered for want of contraceptives and condoms.

The complications of John Paul II went beyond his conflicts with modernity. While he rebuked Catholic theologians who had dared to question Papal infallibility and other aspects of traditional law, he acknowledged the actual fallibility of his predecessors with two remarkable acts: his apology for the past sins of the church against "our elder brothers in faith," the Jews, and his broader apology for the church's errors during the millennium celebration.

In that open spirit and in defiance of old prejudices, he enunciated his most profound message, venturing from church to synagogue to mosque, meeting and praying with the prelates and priests of other denominations and even other religions. Unafraid to embrace the possibility of truth and grace in diverse faiths, he inspired multitudes in his campaigning for human solidarity. Immune to cynicism, this great and good man served us all as the tireless apostle of peace and reconciliation-which is why so many people who disagreed with John Paul II will continue to read him, admire him and honor his memory.

The phrase "culture of life" refers to the Bible: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:17). Whose life? In what circumstances? How many blessings and cursings accompany the choice? These are the questions that arise when prophecy encounters law and politics.

The hardest case for the culture of life is capital punishment. Some of those who wanted Terri Schiavo to live were distressed that President Bush could not simply reach down and pardon her. He couldn't do that because of her innocence; pardons are for the likes of Marc Rich, not for the guiltless. But the culture of life, in its most aggressive form, wants to save the guilty, too. The week before Easter, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops launched a campaign to abolish the death penalty in the United States. (President Bush parts from the culture of life on this point.) There is a long rap against the death penalty, based on bungled convictions and last-minute rescues by DNA tests. But the nub of the opposition to capital punishment is unwillingness to inflict the ultimate penalty. The Catholic bishops would maintain Brian Nichols, the Atlanta murderer, and Osama bin Laden on the public tab to the end of their natural days. They say they would do it from respect for life, but protecting multiple murderers pushes respect for life so far that it turns on itself. Whether the bishops have a sneaking fascination with the bloody man who does what they dare not, or a Graham Greene­-ish contempt for the merely law-abiding who supply his victims, only their confessors know.

Abortion is a much easier argument for the culture of life to make, though in fact it runs into the greatest political difficulties. The unborn are pure potential. The world is all before them, as it was before Milton's Adam and Eve when they left paradise. The mere betting man, leave aside theologians, would let a fetus have his shot. In practice, however, a laissez-faire policy towards the unborn requires another human being, the mother, to set aside a chunk of her life, which is a powerful contrary interest. So abortion has been legal all these years, though pro-lifers keep up the struggle against it.

The Schiavo case threw us into the middle ground of the ailing. When are the crippled and the old as good as dead? When, therefore, can we kill them without a qualm? Our motives in these matters are partly aesthetic. From Homer to Hollywood, our civilization has valued beauty and strength. We turn away from ugliness and weakness, and we turn away, even more sharply, from the thought of being ugly and weak ourselves. Robert Conquest put it best in the last line of his limerick on the seven ages of man.

Seven ages: first, puking and mewling;

Then very pissed off at one's schooling;

Then fucks; then fights;

Then settling chaps' rights;

Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.

Allied to our sense of aesthetics is our pride in self-reliance. Worse even than drool is the inability to wipe it away. Urine, feces, snot-didn't we gain control over those decades ago? Yet here they come again, back by no popular demand. We fear dependence on the kindness of relatives or-what is more likely in nursing homes-of strangers.

Suffering is the final chapter of our anxiety, though you would think that a pharmaceutical industry that can make Mark McGuire hit 70 home runs in a single season could also blunt any raging pain. There is no pill for the mental suffering of anticipation, however.

Science gives us no answers. It is a demented long-distance runner, madly striking problems and solutions with each alternating stride. Scientists wrest years from death, then scramble to make them bearable.

The interests of the baby boomers-me and, very likely, you-tug in contrary directions. They are now watching their parents, the greatest generation, fade away. They have seen plugs pulled; they have pulled them. On the other hand, they may not relish the thought of Generation X bundling them off before their time. If we don't fix the Social Security system, Generation X's reserves of human charity will be more than usually depleted.

For years, family doctors and hospitals have made discreet use of the kindly overdose of morphine. But law is uncomfortable operating in the shadows. Where should its lines be drawn? Politics can teach us nothing about moral philosophy, but it does train us in figuring out who is winning, who is losing. When we look at the dynamics of life and death, which side is sweeping all before it? Is it the Christians praying in the street outside Terri Schiavo's hospice? Is it Congress, whose two-party system is the serious and the showboaters? Is it George and Jeb Bush? Or is it a handful of medical experts, and the judges who heed them? Two branches of the federal government wrapped themselves in awesome majesty to save a woman's life, but the bench held firm. In Europe, the tide is even stronger. The Dutch practice euthanasia so briskly that they will kill themselves even before the Islamists get around to it.

Slippery-slope arguments are the poor relatives in the family of disputation; real logicians, we feel, have no truck with such stuff. But politicians make them all the time. The Declaration of Independence is a slippery-slope argument: George III's "repeated injuries and usurpations" have "in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny"; if absolute tyranny had been already established, Jefferson couldn't be writing. Better stand with the losing side on this one. Make your own arrangements, but keep the law as far away as possible.

But the next stanza decided that, in fact, the Pope leads no jolly life: "He has no maid, nor blushing wife." The Sultan, said the third stanza, "better pleases me" on account of his harem. In stanza four, we learned that, even so, "the Sultan is a wretched man," for "He must obey the Al-Koran," which forbids drinking.

Stanza five put it all together: "So when my sweetheart kisses me, / I'll think that I'll the Sultan be, / And when my Rhenish wine I tope, / Why, then I'll think I am the Pope."

There is not much Rhenish wine or toping ahead for Pope John Paul II, fresh from his tracheotomy. As the Pope goes into that good night, thoughts turn to his long career. Catholics must judge how he has filled the throne of St. Peter; journalists (and everyone else) can have an opinion on him as a public figure, like the Dalai Lama or Clint Eastwood.

Purple-fingered Iraqis voting on their own destiny, and Lebanese demonstrating in Martyrs Square for freedom from Syrian overlordship, are the latter-day heirs of the John Paul II, for the quarter-century of liberation which is now shaking the Middle East began with him, when the brand-new Polish Pope made a pilgrimage to his homeland in the summer of 1979.

The 1970's, if not quite a low, dishonest decade, was a low, confused one. The United States was mired in Nixonian détente and Carterian weakness. The Soviet Union, though we now know it was exhausted, seemed on the march, acquiring clients in Africa and rattling its rockets at Western Europe. John Paul II rewrote the political equation. His mere presence in Poland was an affront to the officially atheistic regime. He drew crowds of up to one million and told the Poles that they were men, not new Soviet men.

The consequences were both immediate and long-term. Solidarity, Poland's first independent labor union, was founded in 1980, inspired by John Paul II's visit. The authorities crushed it, but its spirit lived on. In 1989, most of the Eastern European dictatorships washed away. The Soviet Union and South Africa soon followed; later, Afghanistan, the Ukraine and Iraq. All of these countries had their own dissident movements, or outside help, or both. Some changed peacefully, some with rebellions, some with wars. But John Paul II led the way.

The remainder of his political career has been a disappointment, typical of Vatican diplomacy for the last few centuries. John Paul II could not actively encourage the tidal wave he helped to start, because he is next-door to a pacifist. The Vatican has never taken the final step to complete nonviolence; it acknowledges, in theory, that there may be just wars. But the church bureaucracy, and John Paul II himself, sets the bar for just war so high that whenever there has been a clash of arms between despotism and its enemies, the Pope has come down on the side of inaction, which in effect leaves the despots secure in their palaces and their rape rooms. Anything that cannot be accomplished by making a pilgrimage to Kraków has not gotten his blessing. As a result, the Marines have to do the hard work of liberation on their own.

John Paul II has maintained the Catholic Church as a force in the world-sometimes, it seems, all by himself. Christianity of any kind in Europe is dead; Catholicism loses ground to Protestant churches in Latin America; the Catholic Church in the United States is buffeted by crosscurrents. During this low-pressure front, the Pope has been a tireless advocate and presence. In an age first of television, then of the Internet, why travel? You can be everywhere at home, whether you're making amateur porn or singing Romanian pop songs. John Paul II didn't see it that way. Woody Allen said that 85 percent of celebrity is showing up. Eighty-five percent of John Paul's papacy has been about showing up. If there's a Catholic in the world who hasn't laid eyes on him, it is not John Paul II's fault.

Other responsibilities got lost in the shuffle. An American can be excused for noting that John Paul II's administrative style was catastrophically slack. The scandal of priestly sex abuse was not Father Shanley's perversion; it was Cardinal Law's negligence and collusion. Older New Yorkers remember the liberal judge known to the tabloids as "Turn 'em Loose Bruce." Cardinal Law was "Let 'em Free Bernie." He and his equally culpable bishops were more interested in caring for a small flock of deranged priests than in caring for their flock. They were the apparat that John Paul II put in place; he shares their failure.

Now John Paul II is falling apart before our eyes. The handsome skier, the tireless pilgrim, has become a wraith, like characters in Endgame, like the inhabitants of a thousand nursing homes. He could shut himself up in Castel Gandolfo or in a hospital, but he doesn't. What does he mean to say by exhibiting himself to us?

I looked for the first time into the Pensées of Pascal, the 17th-century French Christian mathematician; it was a free copy in a box of books on the street. I can't judge a book by its contents so quickly, but one phrase that Pascal seems to use repeatedly is that we must hate ourselves, since we and nature are corrupt. That seems perverse. If we are so hateful, why bother with churches? Let the human refuse flush itself away and hold the land for better investments.

Pascal's advice also seems redundant. The world does quite enough hating of us without our adding to it. Tsunamis and terrorists slaughter us. Cancers pick us off one by one. Even without such spectacular exits, we wear out, grow weak, whisper, shake. Our lovely rose-tinted flesh rots away, like roses. Everyone knows this, and everyone does not want to know this. So John Paul II is using his star power to remind us. Also to tell us that we are still worthy of respect and love, if only for old times' sake.

How strange? Kundun is a pro-religious, anticommunist movie. How common a combination is that in Hollywood? The scenes between Mao Zedong and the young Dalai Lama are played as phantasmagoria, with the scientific socialist, not the god-king, in the role of the monstrous dream-figure.

Kundun defends a medieval society. Mr. Scorsese bravely gives us glimpses of Tibet's weird antiquity. When the Dalai Lama and his court ponder an important question, they consult a possessed shaman. This Buddhism is not the California Zen variety.

I consulted the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica on Tibetan religion, and found this stern dismissal of the influence that Tantra had upon it: "Some unhappy scholar of a future age may have to trace its loathsome history." But the article goes on to note that a 14th-century reformer purged his country of Tantra's grosser elements, so even Tibet once felt the winds of change.

These changes stopped well short of our notions of modernity-a fact the Communist Chinese have tried to exploit in their lumbering counteroffensive to American Tibet-mania. Chinese flacks boast that, under their regime, literacy has gone up (true, it is literacy in Chinese, not in Tibetan), while Jiang Zemin, on his trip here some months ago, casually remarked that the Chinese Communists had abolished slavery in Tibet.

Prof. Leonard Jeffries, hearing this, looks up from his beakers where he is performing melanin research and asks, "Did the Jew take my people even there?" No, Professor Jeffries, slavery has not happened only to the black man, or in the United States. Serfdom has been the historic norm the world over, and while Jiang obviously seeks to put the worst possible gloss on the pre-revolutionary society of Tibet, it is equally true that no American would volunteer to have lived in its lowest orders.

The Dalai Lama in the movie says that his country was about to change itself, on its own. His honesty is not to be questioned. But if we are honest, we must admit that the heroic devotion shown by his subjects-culminating in the bravery of the horsemen who guide him over the Indian border, and whom he foresees bloody and dead by their mounts as a reward for their service-is a premodern, prerational virtue. They did not get it by passing a law. It sprang from their faith, and their way of life. What is good about Tibet is inextricable from what is odd and ancient.

This should give modern men pause-not just the pathological among us, the socialists and the national socialists, but also we, the democratic capitalists. We, too, bustle about the world, upsetting apple carts. Different goods, lesser goods, even evils are delicate things to change or extract. When a society has destroyed itself, then a hero may build anew in the ruins, as Kemal Ataturk did in Turkey after World War I. Patient conquerors can alter particular institutions, as the British abolished suttee in India, without trying to remake Hinduism. But when a country is moving along under its own steam, it is a rash man, if not a wicked one, who sets his hand to the framework of it.

Americans don't believe this. Got a problem? Call in the United Nations and the A.C.L.U. Where Tibet is concerned, the robes and the chants and the yaks distract us, but anywhere else we revert to our normal frame of mind. Just look at the Pope's visit to Cuba.

Now John Paul II is a celebrity as well as a pontiff, and he won the glam contest, even against Fidel. But if I read once, I read a dozen times the paeans to Mr. Castro's intentions. He increased medical care. He increased literacy. He closed the brothels. After I went to Havana in the mid-1980's, I talked about the trip with an old friend, an incorrigible Communist; when I told him that unmistakable whores cruised up and down the sidewalk outside the Hotel Habana Libre (formerly the Havana Hilton), his face fell. Poverty, isolation, caudillismo-he could swallow it all. But Fidel, he believed, had closed the brothels.

Never mind that the medical care was provided by low-grade nurses. Never mind that the literacy enabled people to read Fidel's speeches, and nothing else. Never mind that the whores simply shifted from brothels to streetwalking (the pretty ones were no doubt reserved for the Communists and their special guests). Fidel was not Batista. Fidel was not whoever preceded Batista. Fidel was new and clean and progressive. Long live progress, long live Castro.

On my visit, I didn't just goggle at hookers. I also went to a church service. In the First Methodist Church of Havana, in fact. A more wretched group of compromised believers could not be imagined. They were the precise equivalent of those Tibetans who stayed behind and made their peace with the Chinese Communists, maybe intending to save what they could, maybe intending to get ahead. But no fancy Americans appeared to defend the Cuban faithful. The only fancy American there that day was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom I was covering, who attended the church service in the retinue of Fidel Castro, the jailer of the congregation he hectored. Religion is no guarantee of virtue. Some clerics are like John Paul II, or the Dalai Lama, speaking truth to power. Some are like Mr. Jackson, picking crumbs from the tables of the powerful.

What will happen in Cuba and Tibet? The world is clamoring for the United States to lift its embargo on Cuba, which became obsolete with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would be a nice gesture to end it as a present to the Pope. Tibet looks hopeless-but no more hopeless than the cause of the Baltic nations looked, up until 1989. If the Asian economic slowdown hits China, there could be unimaginable upheavals.

Tibet and Cuba-so alike in fact, so different when Oscar time rolls around. If the Dalai Lama wore a white robe, and John Paul II wore a colored one, would Hollywood see them differently?