On the night of October 16, 1978 , a huge, impatient crowd in floodlit St Peter's Square cheered wildly as white smoke curled from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, signalling the election of a new pope.

Cardinal Pericle Felici emerged later to introduce Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland , the first non-Italian pope since 1523.

Felici couldn't find his way around the awkward-sounding Polish, or remember his phonetic instructions. “Voy-TEE-wah,” he ventured bravely. Hardly anyone, it seemed, knew who “Voy-TEE-wah” was. Twenty-seven years later, there's hardly anyone who doesn't.

Cardinal Wojtyla, who took the name Pope John Paul II, had the longest pontificate of the twentieth century, the second longest in the history of the Church, a 26-year era that has seen sweeping political changes around the world, the growth of the Roman Catholic Church to more than a billion baptised members from 750 million, and the beginning of Christianity's Third Millennium.

There are so many sides to Pope John Paul II, the man -- actor, poet, philosopher, theologian, statesman, spiritual master, linguist (in eleven languages) -- and to his papacy, it's impossible to do anything close to justice to either in the space of a 1200 word. A few selected highlights will have to suffice.

First, his global travels. Pope Paul VI was the first pope of the modern period to travel outside Italy . Before him, John XXIII had made only two trips out of the Vatican by train. Pope John Paul II not only travelled outside Italy.

He travelled to 129 countries on 104 trips. He visited and revisited Poland , and made several other trips to European nations. Apart from journeys to Asia and to Central America , to nations of the former Soviet Empire, and a significant trip to the Holy Land, he made four trips to Mexico, five to the mainland US, and twelve to Africa.

These visits often met with demonstrations and protests. Church officials and theologians also questioned their value. They claimed they left no lasting impression, and cost a great deal of money that could have been better spent alleviating some of the very ills the Pope was speaking out against.

Yet, as the journeys grew in number, it became clear that they were more than mere visits to a sprawling worldwide flock. They were meant to be a central feature of his papacy.

As one journalist put it, they represented “the forceful, global reassertion of Roman Catholic orthodoxy through a new sacramental exercise, using jet planes, television, and a remarkable stage presence.”

Secondly, relations with the Jews. The pope's visit to the Holy Land in 2000 was part of a series of moves, some of them bold and path-breaking, to end the historic estrangement between Catholics and Jews.

In June 1990, the Holy See and Jerusalem established full diplomatic relations with an exchange of ambassadors. It was a political and religious milestone.

It did not mean that relations were smooth and tension-free, either before the diplomatic accord or after. The pope, for instance, met with Yasser Arafat nine times, to blistering criticism from the government of Israel.

He also conferred a papal knighthood on Kurt Waldheim, generating another similar Israeli reaction. Waldheim was a man whom Jewish leaders said had served with Nazi units that massacred civilians and executed prisoners

In 1998, the pope, however, wrote a historic document, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (Holocaust),” which apologised for the failure of many Catholics to protect Jews in the Holocaust. He was the first pope to call anti-Semitism a sin “against God and man,” the first to pray in a synagogue, and at the Wailing Wall, and the first to refer to Jews as “our elder brothers.”

Thirdly, a Catholic confession. At a solemn service in St Peter's basilica on March 12, 2000 , John Paul II made history by asking pardon for the sins committed by members of the Church over its two thousand year history, especially the sins that caused divisions among Christians.

At the same time, the pope affirmed the holiness of the Church. The Church always remains holy from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but its members sin and contribute to its history of sin.

The confession was part of the pope's vision of an unburdened Church entering the third millennium. Some Church officials, however, claimed that the confession undermined the Church's authority. Others felt that it was too generic. More specific mention should have been made of the Church's misdeeds.

Thomas Reeves, editor of the Jesuit magazine America, added that the pope should have clarified more concretely what he meant by “children of the Church”: “The document should have put it in bold print that ‘children of the Church' includes popes, cardinals and clergy, and not just people in the pews.”

The Holy Father and Muslim religious leaders at the tomb of John the Baptist in the Omeyyades Mosque in Damascus in 2001.

An institutional confession encompassing two thousand years of history could not fail to be (also) summary in character, but there was no denying the event's significance for the millennial juncture. It was essential to the Church's renewed commitment to the demands and teaching of the gospel.

“Never again,” the pope intoned, “contradictions to charity in the service of truth, never again gestures against the communion of the Church, never again offenses against any people, never again recourse to the logic of violence, never again discrimination, exclusion, oppression, disrespect for the poor and the least.”

Finally, the statesman. It is reported that when the “man from a far country,” as the pope described himself on the balcony of St Peter's, the day of his ascension to the chair of Peter, Yuri Andropov, head of the Russian KGB, told his Stalinist colleagues in Krakow: “This is not good news.” Andropov didn't know how prophetic his words would become.

In 1979, millions turned out for the pope's first visit to Poland , his homeland, congregating independently of the government and experiencing a liberating sense of their own autonomy.

This visit, in retrospect, was widely viewed as a detonator of the Solidarity labour movement's challenge to the communist government in 1980, and ultimately of the changes that swept the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a decade later.

The collapse of communism was a bloodless collapse, a non-violent overthrow of one of the most malevolent orders the world has ever known. To refer to this change as ushered in by non-violence is to indicate immediately the powerful reserves for change the notion contains, something the pope returned to again and again in his encounters with dictators and militarist regimes the world over.

“Solidarity, solidarity,” he chanted to unionists in Brazil. In other words, there are ways to face down militarism in your country. Take a leaf out of the book of the Solidarity union in Poland.

The pope's personal knowledge of the aberrations of Nazism and Stalinism was always at the back of his championing of political emancipation, human rights, and freedom from economic tyranny. This did not mean uncritical support for Western society.

He thought the West too overcome by materialism and permissiveness, and was unsparing in his criticism of unbridled capitalism, which always left the poor behind and poorer.

The Church will miss this many-sided papacy, and the world a great, many-sided man. Greatness, of course, does not mean that the pope's characteristics and policies all line up in the positive column. It refers to his lasting, induplicable impact on the life of the Church and the world.

It may still be a bit early to refer to John Paul II as John Paul the Great -history has some settling to do -, but if and when the designation occurs, it will be one that is completely and entirely fitting.