It is difficult to catalogue how many ways Pope John Paul II affected the world. But the best way is perhaps to recall what the world was like when he became the Pope.
The Wall Street Journal described that now-gone world as follows:
In the post-Berlin Wall world this man did so much to shape, it’s difficult to recall the much different circumstances that obtained when he assumed the chair of St. Peter.
Former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro had been kidnapped and executed by terrorists. In
Iran bloody protests were brewing that would within months pull down the Shah and usher in the ayatollahs. In the Soviet Union the dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (now the Israeli Natan Sharansky) was dispatched to the gulag, while Afghanistan had already endured the leftist coup that would, in short order, lead to a full-fledged Soviet invasion. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were still in the future, and so was a workers’ strike called by an unknown Pole named Lech Walesa.
Everywhere one looked, the truth of the Brezhnev Doctrine seemed brutally self-evident: Once Communist, always Communist.
Charles Krauthammer wrote on the same theme:
It is hard to remember now how dark those days were. The 15 months following the pope’s elevation marked the high tide of Soviet communism and the nadir of the free world’s post-Vietnam collapse.
It was a time of one defeat after another.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia, consolidating Soviet hegemony over all of Indochina. The Khomeni revolution swept away America’s strategic anchor in the Middle East. Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas, the first Soviet-allied regime on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere. . . . Then finally, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. And yet precisely at the time of this free-world retreat and disarray, a miracle happens. The Catholic Church, breaking nearly 500 years of tradition, puts itself in the hands of an obscure non-Italian — a Pole who, deeply understanding the East European predicament, rose to become, along with Roosevelt, Churchill and Reagan, one of the great liberators of the 20th century.
It was part of the same process that he recognized Israel, traveled there, and appeared in the Rome synagogue as Joseph, to call the Jews his "elder brothers."