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But the Pope's vision stretched far beyond Poland. Just before he ascended the throne of Peter in 1978, Karol Wojtyla had confided to some German bishops an astonishing prediction of European Communism's inevitable demise. As an ideology, said the onetime philosophy professor, Communism had nothing more to say and stood for nothing except the perpetuation of power. As an economic system, it had failed utterly. During the Pope's 1979 visit to Orthodoxy's Ecumenical Patriarch in Turkey, a papal adviser told TIME's Wilton Wynn that John Paul urgently hoped to bring Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church together. Reason: the Pope was convinced that Communism faced inevitable collapse and that Soviet bloc nations would turn to Christianity to fill the void.
Though talk of Communism's collapse seemed like wishful thinking at that time, John Paul based his uncanny prediction on a keen sense of moral and historical dynamics, and also on personal experience. Unlike other leaders in the West, he knew what it was like to live under a Marxist regime day by day. Through the 1980s his speeches hammered home the concept of a Europe reunited from the Atlantic to the Urals and inspired by Christian faith. John Paul marked 1988's millennium of Ukrainian and Russian Christendom by evoking Europeans' "desire that barriers should be broken down."
If those barriers have really begun to topple, it is largely owing to the political reforms Gorbachev has inspired throughout the East bloc. In the process, the Soviet leader has let Christians start rebuilding their devastated institutions. Gorbachev is not motivated by religious belief, though he was baptized into Orthodoxy by his grandparents, and his mother remains a faithful churchgoer. His aims are temporal and pragmatic: he hopes to harness the force of Christianity in the fight against his country's moral decay, seen in growing drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, sloth and a 50% divorce rate. Says Russian Orthodoxy's Metropolitan Pitirim: "Everyone has realized that failures in the economy and politics are a result of ethical violations. We want a renewed sense of spiritual values."
Gorbachev has also grasped the fact that political and economic survival depends upon the goodwill of the Soviet people, among whom Christians have always far outnumbered Communists. Gorbachev, moreover, needs the cooperation of the West, observes Father Mark, a reform-minded Orthodox priest in Moscow, who considers Gorbachev's program within the U.S.S.R. "a result of foreign policy necessity." More than any of the 18 summit meetings between Soviet leaders and U.S. Presidents, Gorbachev's pilgrimage to the papal library will make his nation a respectable participant in world discourse.
The road to this week's Vatican meeting was paved by 212 decades of subtle diplomatic maneuvers. Beginning with John XXIII's papacy and the Second Vatican Council, the Vatican's master diplomat, Agostino Casaroli, pursued church Ostpolitik that sought openings in Eastern Europe in return for a more conciliatory stance toward Communism. But neither that strategy nor John Paul II's more hard-nosed approach achieved much before Gorbachev took power.