Although Pope John Paul II called the collapse of the Soviet empire 'God's victory', it was also his own. But the follow-up he desired, re-establishment of full communion with the Orthodox Church, has not come about.

His Ostpolitik is only a half success, but this was much more than almost anyone foresaw on his election in 1978. Pope John Paul II was a catalyst in th fall of Central and Eastern European communist regimes.

With hindsight it appears that the regimes were eroded by factors such as disillusionment with Communist ideology, the growing gap between the Communist sphere and the West which tourism increasingly revealed, and the strain put on the Soviet economy by the arms race.

Moreover, Gorbachev's attempt to save the system produced a revolution of rising expectations and undercut the old guard Communist leadership in the satellite countries.

But at the moment the Archbishop of Krakow became Pope John Paul II, Central and Eastern European Communist regimes looked destined to last until the third millennium. In the 1960s the Vatican had begun diplomatic negotiations with the regimes precisely because it was convinced that they were durable.

Pope John Paul's election meant a startling change: an insider from the Communist sphere became head of a worldwide church. The "Church of Silence" had found a voice and his first message, which reverberated through Eastern Europe, was to go beyond fear: "Open your doors to Christ, open state borders and political and economic systems. Be not afraid."

Pope John Paul II in Rome was a problem for the Communists but an even greater problem was Pope John Paul II in Poland. He knew that the Communists had little support but survived because people, isolated and downcast, and felt it was impossible to change the system.

In his 1979 visit Pope John Paul II, who said clearly that the regime had no popular legitimacy, attracted huge crowds whose members became aware that they constituted a majority. The response inspired Lech Walesa and others to found the Solidarity movement, whose very name indicated what was most lacking under the Communist system.

Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski has said that the papal trip of 1979 meant the end for Communism. The English historian, Timothy Garton Ash, agreed: "I do believe that the Pope's first great pilgrimage to Poland was the turning point". Gorbachev wrote that the changes in Central and Eastern Europe could not have occurred without John Paul II.

There had been uprisings against Communism in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary and Poland in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Some Western leaders seemed embarrassed by these events. Pope John Paul II was the first leader in the West to understand intimately a protest movement in the Soviet sphere.

He publicly supported Solidarity. (There are claims that the Vatican financed Solidarity and there was a secret President Reagan-Pope John Paul II pact to undermine the Soviet empire. There is no secret about Pope John Paul II's sympathies but the Vatican pursues its own policies, not America's).

Pope John Paul II was more assured and firmer than his predecessors in his approach to Central and Eastern Europe. It has been said that he grabbed the ball and ran downfield. But he was not headstrong. Gorbachev, who renounced use of the Soviet Army in Poland, was convinced that Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church there, were moderating factors which would allow gradual transformation of the society.

However, the transformation went further than he foresaw and the breakthrough in Poland triggered the implosion of Communism throughout Central-Eastern Europe. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall Pope John Paul II warned against dangers such as excessive nationalism in the post-Communist era. In the event there were unpleasant surprises in store for him: from acceptance of abortion to a consumerist mentality, from the ravages of unrestrained capitalism to the fragility of the church.

Communist hostility to religion was replaced by growing indifference to it and ex-Communists were voted into power in many countries (although their defeat in the Lithuanian elections in October 1996 indicated a possible swing of the pendulum).

Solidarity was betrayed by its success: it had become more than a trade union, it was an expression of antiregime national sentiment. It underwent a dramatic shrinkage when the Communists were defeated and the successors of its founders were comparatively mediocre. More worrying, and not only for Pope John Paul II, was the evaporation of the Solidarity spirit of dialogue and idealism.

The church needed time in Poland; it had to rethink its role after the abrupt change from being the expression of all opponents of the regime, while elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe it had to reconstruct.

All the churches, including for instance the largely compromised East German Evangelical church, had seemed strong just before Communism melted into air because all those dissatisfied with the system used them as channels of protest.

Once Communism dissolved, many of these temporary allies of the churches went their own way. The streetcar which crashed through the Berlin Wall was called desire for something else.

As a result, the churches were not as strong as they seemed at the end of the 1980s. They could be strengthened, however, as Pope John Paul II realised, by unity.

His dream was that the Catholic and Orthodox churches would come together and enable Europe to heal the Western-Eastern split between the Latin and Byzantine traditions.

This would enable Europe, he said, to "breath with two lungs." Significantly, he was not been invited to any country with an Orthodox majority. He was invited to talk to Morocco's Muslims but not to Eastern European Orthodox. In mid-1996 he tried to meet the Russian Patriarch Alexis at Pennonholma Abbey in Hungary, but Alexis' Synod would not agree to the Patriarch attending.

The Orthodox accept the Pope as a brother in Christ but not as a boss. They do not accept Rome's jurisdictional claims. Their insecurity in the disconcerting post-Communist era augments their difference. They fear that the Catholic church is part of the invasive, wealthy West and that its professed ecumenism is mere tactics.

At the beginning of the 1990s the Vatican was insensitive to these Orthodox fears, but later it recognised that the Catholic church should not compete with the Orthodox on their home ground.

Pope John Paul II proposed that the Orthodox and Catholic church's pay tribute together to the martyrs they had under Communism.

It was a fine idea. However, some of the Catholic martyrs were at the hands of the Orthodox: the Orthodox benefited when the Communists repressed the Catholic "Eastern rite" churches in the Ukraine and elsewhere, and in Romania some Catholic bishops died while confined in Orthodox monasteries.

A second problem was that when Communist discrimination against both churches ended, the pre-Communist dislike of Catholics re-emerged strongly among some Orthodox. A third problem was that there was no single Orthodox interlocutor for Pope John Paul II.

If the Patriarch of Constantinople responded positively to the Vatican, that of Moscow reacted negatively, and viceversa. In the years before his death mutual ignorance was being reduced, and there was Catholic-Orthodox collaboration at ordinary level. But Pope John Paul's holy impatience for reunion never looked likely to be satisfied.

Desmond O'Grady is an author and journalist resident in Rome. His most recent book is The Turned Card - Christianity before and after the Wall.