E-Mail This Article to a Friend Target: The Third World John Paul II made certain his conservative legacy would live on BY FRANCIS J. CONNOLLY

IN LIFE, Pope John Paul II was an epic figure, one of the giants of the late 20th century. The conclave that opens later this month in Rome to choose his successor — and thereby define the extent of his legacy — will determine whether, in death, John Paul II remains the dominant figure of the Catholic Church as well.

To much of the world, John Paul’s legacy is already set. He will forever be known as the Polish laborer’s son who provided a defiant answer to Stalin’s sneering rhetorical question — How many divisions does the pope have? — and forced Stalin’s successors to recognize a power greater than mere military strength.

Though John Paul has been given too much credit, especially in recent eulogies, for toppling the Soviet Union almost single-handedly, he was clearly a major force in destabilizing the Soviet puppet regime in his native Poland. And his success there unquestionably emboldened those who eventually brought down the Berlin Wall in late 1989.

As a result, John Paul gained a status common among his medieval predecessors but unheard-of for a modern pope — that of a true power on the world stage. It was a status he both deserved and enjoyed; Carl Bernstein, one of his many biographers, has called John Paul "a geopolitical genius," and there are many voices to second that view.

But John Paul’s extraordinary power and influence were a function of his nationality, his brilliance, his charisma, and the unique confluences of Cold War politics. They did not derive from the papacy itself, so his successor can hardly expect to continue playing John Paul’s role as an international power broker.

But that successor will have to decide whether to continue John Paul’s policies within the Church. He will have to decide whether John Paul’s extraordinary doctrinal conservatism, his rigid orthodoxy, and his steadfast rejection of any secular influences on Church thinking are the right way to lead Catholics into the 21st century.

How the next pope decides that question — whether he accepts or rejects the doctrinal legacy of John Paul — will determine, among many other things, what the American Catholic Church will look like in 75 years. Or whether, in fact, there still will be an American Catholic Church as we know it.

THE CONSENSUS view of John Paul that has emerged in the media over the past few days is a neat study in contrasts: this pope, it holds, was a modernist who looked relentlessly to the future on matters of world affairs, but a traditionalist who remained stuck squarely in the past on matters of Church doctrine and policy.

Like most examples of media consensus, this one is too pat; the image of John Paul as a die-hard traditionalist, mired in the past, is just a little off. While the late pope was undoubtedly a traditionalist — a fundamentalist, in the strict sense of the word — he was not, in his own mind, stuck in the past at all.

As his supporters fervently argue, John Paul had a clear vision of the future. The problem for the Catholic Church in America is that John Paul’s vision did not include us — or at least most of us.

To John Paul, the future of the Catholic Church lay in the burgeoning populations of Latin America and Africa, as well as in the Philippines. These are the places that will supply new souls and new energy; the pope saw them as more important to the 21st-century Church than effete, secularized America.

Given all that, it was a bit silly to hear American Catholics argue, as we so often did, that John Paul would have to liberalize Church teachings and doctrine or risk losing the American Church. To John Paul, most American Catholics, like those in Western Europe, had already left the Church — they just didn’t know it yet.

From John Paul’s standpoint, it could be argued that changing the Church’s teachings and doctrines — on contraception, abortion, gay rights, the role of women in the Church, the right to die — to appease the secularized West would amount to selling out the Church’s future in a vain attempt to hold on to a dying past. Liberalizing Church doctrines would in fact limit their appeal to millions of potential Catholics in the undeveloped, undereducated, non-secularized Third World — potential Catholics for whom rigid orthodoxy holds the appeal of blessed certainty and structure.

To be sure, John Paul never completely wrote off America and Western Europe; there are too many souls here, as well as too much money and influence. But if you accept his view of the future, American Catholics would inevitably face a choice: return to orthodoxy or leave the Church. And inevitably, the American Church itself would face a choice: become much smaller, as millions of secular Catholics leave, or keep those Catholics in the fold by breaking with Rome in an American schism.

The starkness of those choices is something most American Catholics don’t want to accept — just as many find it hard to reconcile the stern fundamentalism of John Paul’s doctrines with his public persona, especially in the early years of his papacy.

Back in October 1978, when Karol Wojtyla ascended to the Throne of Saint Peter, there were high hopes that he would be a liberal reformer in the style of Pope John XXIII. He was, after all, young (only 58) and vigorous, a gifted intellectual and brilliant linguist, an actor and a playwright, media-savvy, non-Italian, and not a product of the sclerotic Vatican bureaucracy. He was a champion of social justice and an advocate of reaching out to those of different faiths, especially Jews. All these things screamed "liberal" to an unsuspecting America.

Most of all, he was with "us" — with the West, or so we thought. We thought so because he was demonstrably against "them" — against the Soviet Union, which had imprisoned his homeland.

We thought this because most of us were not familiar with Wojtyla’s eloquent espousal, which he continued as pope, of a "Third Way" — a path between the two great materialist doctrines of communism and capitalism. John Paul was no fan of the West, with its capitalist excesses and consumer culture, and he was no liberal. Many of us just didn’t want to believe that, even after we knew it.

THERE IS little doubt that the next pope will fit John Paul’s doctrinally conservative mold: all but three of the 117 cardinal electors in conclave were, after all, named by John Paul himself.

In addition, the late pope changed the rules of conclave to make the election of a conservative candidate more likely. In past conclaves, election of the new pope required a supermajority — two-thirds plus one of the cardinals present and voting.

This requirement often forced a conservative majority to accept a more moderate compromise candidate as the only way to avoid a stalemate. Another incentive for compromise was the fact that the cardinals were housed in cramped, makeshift cubicles in the Apostolic Palace; the longer a conclave lasted, the greater the cardinals’ desire to agree on a new pope and get home to their own comfortable beds.

This time, however, the two-thirds requirement applies only to the first 30 ballots; after that, a simple majority will be sufficient to elect a new pontiff, and the incentive for the conservatives to compromise will disappear. And, in case any of the conservative cardinals might find it difficult to hold out for 30 ballots, John Paul built the Domus Sanctae Marthae — a modern, luxury-hotel-style dormitory in Vatican City that now houses the cardinals in conclave.

So odds are, the next pope will indeed be a conservative. But in the Catholic Church, as elsewhere, there are conservatives and then there are conservatives. Back in 1958, few if any would have predicted that the mildly conservative, plodding career diplomat Angelo Roncalli would become the breathtakingly dynamic John XXIII — yet somehow he did.

And there is always the chance that, for all John Paul’s planning, the conclave will produce a genuine surprise, perhaps along the lines of his predecessor. When Albino Luciani became Pope John Paul I in August 1978, he had a reputation for moderate conservatism, but he quickly signaled an intention to begin wide-reaching reforms — including, some Vatican experts believe, a possible shift in the Vatican’s position against artificial contraception.

John Paul I showed every sign of taking the Church in a new direction; then, only 33 days into his papacy, he died suddenly. It’s an open question what might have happened if Luciani rather than Wojtyla had been pope these past 26 years, but it’s certain that the Church — and the world — would both be very different.

So the new pope will surely be a conservative, but he need not be another John Paul II. Whether he is — and what lies ahead for the American Church — we will begin to discover in about 10 days, when the first puff of white smoke emerges from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.

Francis J. Connolly, a former Phoenix political writer, is a senior analyst at Kiley & Company, a Boston-based public-opinion-research firm.