(KRT) - Pope John Paul II, 84, spiritual leader of the world's one billion Roman Catholics for a quarter of a century, died Saturday.

Firmly conservative in matters of morality and theology, yet passionately progressive on behalf of the poor, immigrants and world peace, John Paul was an uncompromising moral voice and a giant on the world stage.

Even as ill health visibly overtook him, he carried his message around the world - slowed, but never stopped, by bullets, a tumor, a broken hip, arthritis, Parkinson's disease and advancing age.

As he took on such controversial topics as abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, communist oppression and capitalist greed, John Paul found himself allied with differing factions of the secular world. But it was the issues that varied, not his stance: All his positions were grounded in his unwavering belief in the worth and dignity of every human life.

The pontiff's failing health had become an acute public concern in recent years as he grew visibly weaker and struggled at times to walk and speak.

Yet images of John Paul in his prime, stepping off airplanes, kissing the ground of each new nation he visited, or stretching his arms out to cheering crowds in cities as diverse as Manila, Dublin, Sao Paolo and Philadelphia are an indelible part of his legacy.

In 103 pontifical journeys around the globe, including four official visits to the United States, John Paul earned a reputation as the most evangelical pope in the 2,000-year history of Christianity.

He also declared a record 476 people to be saints of the Catholic Church, including Philadelphia's St. Katharine Drexel, foundress of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, in 2000.

The intense national pride John Paul's 1979 visit aroused in his native Poland is credited with hastening the collapse of communism there and across Eastern Europe. He reached out to other faiths: He paid the first papal visit to a synagogue, concelebrated the first papal Mass with an Orthodox patriarch, and promoted reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and major Protestant and Orthodox denominations.

At the same time, however, he challenged trends of the secular world. From the very start of his papacy he warned that a pleasure-seeking, materialistic "culture of death" was eroding Western European and North American cultures, as evidenced by their embracing of extramarital sex, birth control, drugs, abortion, euthanasia and divorce.

He also suppressed liberal dissent within the church, once dismissed Buddhism as an "atheistic" religion, irked the Orthodox Church by seeking a larger Catholic presence in postcommunist Russia, steadfastly opposed the ordination of women, and proposed in a 1995 encyclical that all denominations recognize the pope as supreme bishop of Christianity.

In the final stage of John Paul's pontificate, the church in the United States was rocked by scandal involving sexual abuse by priests and complaints that the Vatican had done too little to address the problem. In June 2002, the Holy See approved an unprecedented set of rules spelling out how American bishops should respond to cases of clergy sex abuse.

Many Catholics in Western Europe and North America chose to disregard his strict moral teachings, especially on matters of sexuality.

Because of his firm stances, John Paul II leaves behind a Roman Catholic Church far more assertive on faith and morals than the institution he inherited. His clarity "strengthened the foundations" of the church for the next century, according to Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, Philadelphia's retired archbishop.

Agree with him or disagree, John Paul was impossible to ignore.

"When you do the reckoning of the 20th century, his will be one of the top five or 10 names, along with the likes of Gandhi and Roosevelt and Churchill," said Martin Marty, a prominent Protestant lecturer and historian of Christianity.

Whether the church continues along the path that John Paul pointed it, or embarks in new directions depends on the 135 elector cardinals now preparing to converge on Rome.

Their first order of business will be papal funeral. Then, in about two weeks, the cardinals will gather under Michelangelo's great ceiling mural in the Sistine Chapel, where they will begin casting ballots for John Paul's successor in a manner little changed in nearly 1,000 years.

And they will announce the result just as John Paul's was announced 25 years ago.

On Oct. 16, 1978, at 6:18 p.m., puffs of white smoke erupted from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel.

Far below, in St. Peter's Square, 200,000 people cheered as Cardinal Pericle Felici of the College of Cardinals, appeared at a balcony. "Habemus Papam!" he declared in Latin - "We have a pope!"

The crowd roared once more.

Then Felici announced the new pope's identity: "Cardinale Karolum Wojtyla."

The roaring paused.

"Voy-teeya?" That wasn't Italian. The crowd stood dumbfounded until someone recognized the name. "Il Polacco!" a voice cried. "The Pole!"

The words zigzagged through the crowd like lightning, and then turned into a cacophony as all grasped their stunning implication: The archbishop of Krakow had been named the first non-Italian pope in 455 years."

As the crowd cheered, the 58-year-old Pope stepped to the balcony.

"I was afraid to receive this nomination," he said, "but I did it in the spirit of obedience to Our Lord and in the total confidence in His mother, the most holy Madonna."

In the square and around the world, millions listened and wondered: Who IS this Cardinal Karol Wojtyla?

Journalists scrambled for details: The new pope was 5-foot-10 and weighed 175 pounds. He did not smoke. He drank wine with meals and liked to ski, kayak and climb mountains.

He was fluent in French, English, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Latin and German, and wrote his own speeches longhand.

During World War II he had done factory labor, and he had dated before entering the priesthood. There was even talk (never confirmed) that he had once been engaged. He was a playwright, a poet, a philosopher and an accomplished actor.

What these charming details failed to convey, however, was the iron that Karol Wojtyla was made of - iron forged by his experiences as a seminarian, priest, bishop, archbishop and cardinal in occupied Poland.

Persecuted first by the Nazis during World War II and by a communist government afterward, the Polish church had responded with toughness. Demanding rigorous obedience from its members, the Catholic hierarchy renounced the material atheism of communism and distanced itself from the Kremlin-backed government for its repressions, executions and abuse.

Within that confrontational context no one within the Polish church - clergy or laity - dared to challenge the authority of the prelates.

And this model of the Polish church as an unyielding bulwark against secular materialism would serve as Karol Wojtyla's model for the worldwide Catholic Church.

About 15 years before he became pope, for example, he led the opposition when the reform-minded Second Vatican Council considered adopting a new vision of the church as a "community of equals" in which laity, clergy and hierarchy seek consensus. The archbishop of Krakow dismissed the "community of equals" model, arguing persuasively that in "a perfect society" the laity take direction from the clergy, the clergy from the prelates, and the prelates from the pope.

That vision of the church as a hierarchically disciplined moral voice would become the hallmark of his papacy.

It was not a universally popular position. French theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu, one of the architects of Vatican II, grumbled that John Paul harked back to the "prototype of the church as an absolute monarchy."

And Chicago sociologist William McReady described John Paul as a "peasant intellectual" who "understands the life of a peasant, but he doesn't understand urbanized, pluralistic societies."

George Weigel, John Paul's official biographer, scoffs at such glib characterizations.

"To read the pontificate of Pope John Paul through the political lens of `liberalism' and `conservatism' is to miss the radical character of the Pope's approach to the papacy," Weigel wrote in 1995.

The pontiff's "distinctively contemporary enunciation of Christian dogma, and his bold departures in papal diplomacy ... will reshape Catholicism's world role well into the third millennium of Christian history."

"Strip away the caricatures," Weigel declared, and history will judge John Paul II a "Christian radical" deserving of the title "Pope John Paul the Great."

Karol Jozef Wojtyla Jr. was born on May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland, 30 miles outside Krakow.

His family's modest home was religious, even by the devoutly Catholic standards of rural Poland. Biographer Tad Szulc wrote that the apartment had a font of holy water at the front door and a small altar in the parlor; Karol Wojtyla Sr. and his wife, Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyla, read to their two sons from the Bible in the evenings.

Emilia Wojtyla was sickly, and began suffering an undiagnosed paralysis when Karol - nicknamed "Lolek" - was about 5. She died when he was 8. His older brother, Edmund, a physician, died in a scarlet-fever epidemic when Karol was 12.

That left Karol alone with his father, a reserved and devout man who was a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army. After Edmund's death, his father quit the army and lived on a meager pension, close to poverty.

Despite its modest size and rural setting, Wadowice was an intellectual center boasting three public libraries, two theaters, and well-regarded secondary schools. About a fourth of Wadowice's 7,000 residents were Jewish.

Young Karol excelled at the local boys' school, where, starting at age 10, he took eight years of Latin and five years of Greek, and participated in dramatics and athletics. He sometimes played goalie for the Jewish soccer team - an unusual gesture in those days.

During adolescence he professed no interest in joining the priesthood, but he was something of a straight arrow, according to Szulc, who reports that his school chums avoided using coarse language in his presence. At age 16, he organized a youth group that pledged to go a year without using tobacco or alcohol.

He graduated first in his class of 44, and in 1938 enrolled on full scholarship in Jagiellonian University, a Catholic college in Krakow. There he studied literature, acted in student dramas, and participated in poetry readings.

And he might have become an actor or playwright except that his life - and all life in Poland - turned upside down when Hitler's army invaded the nation in September 1939.

"The nobility, priesthood, and Jews must be liquidated," declared Reinhard Heydrich, who had been appointed Nazi governor of the region. The cathedral and seminary were closed at the end of October. A month later, Jagiellonian University was closed; 186 professors were deported to concentration camps.

Wojtyla was sent to do hard labor in a stone quarry. Later, he was assigned to a chemical factory.

It was during these turbulent times that Wojtyla encountered the ardently spiritual Jan Tyranowski, a gruff, self-educated Krakow tailor who lectured passionately about mysticism and spoke of his own experiences of divine presence. The two became close friends, and Wojtyla would later credit Tyranowski for helping to turn him to religious life.

That move began in earnest after his father's sudden death from a heart attack in February 1941. Karol was 21. "I never felt so alone," he said years later.

Tyranowski's company and fervent spirituality filled that void, and in the months that followed "I gradually became aware of my true path," he told a group of seminarians two decades later.

"My priestly vocation took shape ... like an inner fact of unquestionable and absolute clarity. The following year, in the autumn, I knew that I was called."

He presented himself to a Carmelite monastery in November 1942, only to be turned away. The monastery was not accepting candidates during the war, the Rev. Josef Prus told him.

There is a legend that Prus declined with the prophetic words "Ad majora natus es" - "You are born for higher things." But Szulc, who interviewed the pontiff in 1994, reported that Prus simply encouraged him to reapply "after the war."

Wojtyla did not wait, instead presenting himself to Krakow's archbishop, Adam Stefan Sapieha, for seminary training. Soon he began to study for the priesthood in secret locations around the city.

After the great Warsaw uprising of Aug. 1, 1944, the Nazis rounded up 8,000 young men in Krakow but failed to discover Wojtyla, who was kneeling at prayer in the basement of his boarding house. Afterward, Archbishop Sapieha concealed Wojtyla and six other seminarians in his residence. In November of that year, Wojtyla took tonsure, the symbolic haircutting that marked his formal entry into religious life.

By the time Soviet troops liberated Poland from the Germans in January 1945, the Nazis had exterminated - along with three million Polish Jews and three million other Poles - 2,000 members of the country's Catholic clergy.

The Soviet occupiers proved slightly more tolerant of religion than the Nazis had been. The cathedral reopened and Archbishop Sapieha ordained Father Wojtyla on Nov. 1, 1946. Eager to rebuild the church intellectually, the archbishop sent this promising young priest to the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelicum, in Rome.

That the archbishop's young protege was "destined for higher things" today is self-evident.

In 1946, however, neither the old archbishop nor the 26-year-old priest could have imagined just how high or fast he would soar. Father Wojtyla would become bishop at 38, archbishop at 44, cardinal at 47, and supreme pontiff of the world's largest religious denomination at 58 - the youngest pope in 132 years.

Like most Christian denominations, the Roman Catholic Church in the 1940s was untroubled by today's fractious debates over sexual morality or the authority of the hierarchy. Most Catholics - and virtually all in the Catholic clergy - shared the 19th-century English Cardinal John Henry Newman's view of the Roman church as "God's oracle." While in Rome, Father Wojtyla studied under the eminent French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, an uncompromising traditionalist - he is said to have disdained telephones as too modern - who reinforced the young priest's conservatism.

For his doctoral dissertation, Father Wojtyla chose to study the 16th-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, a favorite of his old friend Tyranowski's. Although enchanted by John's luminous advice for those seeking union with the divine (it was John who coined the phrase "dark night of the soul"), Father Wojtyla's dissertation faulted John for failing to posit an objective basis for morality.

Father Wojtyla's critique offers an early example of the future pope's lifelong insistence that certain acts are morally wrong for all humans, regardless of culture or tradition.

Upon his return to Poland, he was assigned to a parish but continued his academic career. In 1951, Sapieha - by now a cardinal - urged him to earn a second doctorate so that he could become a university teacher.

This time his thesis was on the 20th-century German philosopher Max Scheler, who believed that just as the mind can intuitively recognize certain mathematical truths, it can intuitively recognize certain moral truths, such as the categorical evil of murder.

Such a view appealed to Father Wojtyla, who, as a professor of ethics, later as a prelate, and ultimately in the role of moral arbiter for one-sixth of the world's population, would decry moral relativism, insisting there were knowable moral truths binding on all human beings.

In 1957, Father Wojtyla was named a professor of ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin. In 1958, he was consecrated auxiliary bishop of Krakow. After Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak's death in 1962, he was named vicar capitular in charge of the archdiocese - a post he held until becoming archbishop two years later.

The year 1962 also marked the start of Vatican II. During the three years of that council, the young prelate began to shape one of the most controversial church teachings of this century: that the use of artificial contraception is a grave sin.

In a series of lectures in Krakow, he argued that contraception closes sexual intercourse to the divine creation of life, and degrades women by turning them into sex objects.

His views profoundly influenced Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, "Humanae Vitae," which declared artificial birth control a mortal sin.

Paul had presented Archbishop Wojtyla with the red cap of a cardinal on May 29, 1967.

Also elevated that day was Wojtyla's good friend John Krol, archbishop of Philadelphia, who in later years took special pride that his gold, cross-shaped cardinal's ring matched that of the Pope.

Cardinal Wojtyla made two trips to the United States. The first, in 1969, included his first helicopter trip - a flight with Cardinal Krol from Philadelphia to Doylestown's Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. He returned in 1976 for the International Eucharistic Congress at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul on Logan Circle.

By then he was an intimate of Pope Paul, who had assigned him to direct three of the Holy See's most prestigious congregations, approximately equivalent to cabinet-level departments.

His growing reputation as a "papabile" - a contender in the discreet competition to be the next pontiff - was enhanced in 1976 when he was invited to the Vatican to deliver a series of Lenten lectures before Pope Paul and the papal household.

Paul even encouraged him to deliver the lectures in Italian, not Latin, to show the other cardinals how well he fit in.

"We are in a lively battle for the dignity of man," Cardinal Wojtyla declared. Secular society was promoting self-indulgence, he said, and pressuring the church's hierarchy to relax its traditional moral norms.

But the church and pope are called upon to contradict such trends, Cardinal Wojtyla insisted: "It is the task of the church, of the Holy See, of all pastors to fight on the side of man - often against men themselves!"

His words may have been an exhortation to the aged and ailing Paul. Intellectual, progressive, and anxious to implement the reforms of Vatican II, Paul provided hesitant and uncertain leadership for the church at a time when the West was going through a cultural revolution.

European and American students were in the vanguard of change. Many laughed at taboos against premarital sex, experimented with drugs, demonstrated against their governments. Some urged armed revolt. In Latin America, priests and nuns preached "liberation theology" and made public stands against totalitarian regimes.