Rick has a thoughtful (as usual) JPII retrospective in his Observer column this week (covering the good and bad). Here’s some of it:

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.