The Power of Presence
For non-Catholics, even more than for Catholics, I suspect, "the pope" will mean John Paul II long after his successor has been crowned. Anne Applebaum's column on what John Paul II actually did to "defeat communism" is must-reading. The conclusion: "He didn't need to man the barricades, in other words, because he had already shown people that they could walk right through them."
Arguably, a contemporary pope need never leave Rome. With television, radio, and the Internet--not to mention plain old ordinary print--why take the trouble to travel? Your message, your voice, your image can be anywhere in the world in an instant. Yet John Paul II left Rome 104 times, "more than all previous popes combined," notes Newsweek in a graphic that unfortunately doesn't appear to be online, and traveled more than 775,000 miles.
The pope understood extraordinarily well was that in an age of pervasive media, personal presence is not less valuable but more so. He didn't need Esther Dyson to teach him. He had Catholic theology--a church that preaches the incarnation of God as man and the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Mass. These doctrines may not be true (I certainly reject them) but they do contain important wisdom: Human beings exist, even in their most spiritual moments, as tactile, physical beings. There is no substitute for personal presence.