John Paul II was a man of his time: the second World War, the Cold War and its conservative aftermath. He was a man of his place: a Poland straddling the central line of European longitude.

Deft artist of mystico-political symbolism, he used the ranks of Solidarity and the immense Baltic shipyard crosses to wall-battering effect. No less powerful, if in gentler vein, were the pilgrimages to Czestochowa.

Speaking to Gorbachev in his own language, and seeing the bankruptcy of the socialist experiment, Papa Wojtyla was vital to the dismembering of the "evil empire", making, for this, a political alliance with the Western power.

For the whole church, discipline, obedience and centralisation would recover ancient glories. With Poland, as with Ireland, the battening down of religious hatches had allowed a people of Catholic culture ride out many a storm; but fidelity to formal observance proved a poor preparation for life in a modern state.

In Nigeria, in the 1960s, a priest colleague told a Protestant friend of his transfer to Brazil. Applying the parable of the Good Samaritan, the friend said that centuries of Catholic monopoly had left Latin Americans lying beaten and robbed in the ditch, clergy passing by unseeing.

Missionaries from his church were now redressing the situation. My colleague had no answer: Latin countries were seen as poor, underdeveloped, and overpopulated, precisely because of their Catholicism.

Unknown to my colleague, the Catholic Church was already preaching so radical a Gospel there that it alarmed, not only Rome, but many evangelicals too. Only after the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, did a significant portion of the

Latin American church cease to ally itself with the elites and make an option for the poor. The poverty in the midst of plenty, experienced by basic ecclesial communities, became material for prayer and reflection for peasant and favella dwellers who organised to change unjust structures that kept them in chains.

Tens of thousands of small groups found light in the Gospels and strength in the Spirit to struggle to undo centuries of sinful privilege. The Old Testament prophetic theme of liberation for the oppressed was the slogan of the new theology.

Salvation was to come from the underside of humanity and the periphery of the church. Recovering their inheritance as children of God, equal to anyone in human dignity and rights, illiterate men and women discovered their political feet, their community solidarity marking the end of theological individualism.

Pope Paul VI had appointed bishops sympathetic to this stance. The new Pope appointed institution men, strong on discipline and supporting the papal line on sexual morality.

Praising politically conservative, middle-class church movements, he had few smiles for the communities of the poor. For Latin America it was not a happy pontificate - Papal homiletic in defence of human rights and critical of unbridled capitalism was belied by the appointment of bishops unsympathetic to such issues and the punishing of clerics taking either cause beyond the domain of rhetoric.

The 1979 revolution in Nicaragua - the first time that the Gospel joined Marxism as underpinning for radical social change - made the country a theological battleground for the soul of the continent. By his public finger-wagging at the Minister of Culture, Ernesto Cardenal - humble monk enough to go down on his knees during the papal visit to Nicaragua - John Paul symbolically disowned clerical participation in radical change and destroyed hopes that he might understand Latin America.

Only the centre might initiate political change. The name of Jesus Christ had been betrayed through early and constant alliance between clergy and power in Latin America.

Through attention to the weakest, the church might now earn respect for a Jesus Christ born of the poor and unjustly done to death for his attitude to the powerful: such a church could only provoke persecution, and Bibles had to be hidden under the earthen floor of many a hut to avoid torture and death for the possession of literature subversive of dictatorial hegemony.

Not glorification of the church, but the coming of the Kingdom of God, prepared by the transformation of the world, was the aim; the power of the Spirit being invoked more often than hierarchical obedience. A total rethink of the Christian message was demanded by so radical a conversion, and a step-by-step discerning of the way forward.

Politics, from being the exclusive domain of the monarchical executive, became integral to all Christians striving for the Kingdom. In Mexico in 1979, the international economic mechanisms that made "the rich [countries] ever richer, at the expense of the increasing impoverishment of the poor", had been characterised by the Pope as more materialist than humanist. Nevertheless, at the moment when dictatorial regimes - supported, like the Somozas in Nicaragua, by US foreign policy - were being challenged in the name of the Gospel, the Latin American church's option for the poor awakened no echo from Rome. As Helder Cāmara, Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, had said: "When I feed the poor they call me a saint; when I ask why so many are poor they call me a communist."

The negative symbolism of not granting a red hat to Helder Cāmara was not lost on Latin Americans. Triumphant neo-liberal capitalism declared an end to the historical possibility of radical social change. The Pope who rang down the curtain on communism, and reigned in clerics sympathetic to liberation of the exploited, could only be a hero.

To look to a world beyond US supremacy, and identify international lust for profit as the new idolatry, could only be unrealistic, if not ungodly.

A group of Latin American bishops, in papal audience in the mid-1980s, was dismayed to hear the Pope bring up bits of scandal about the church in their sub-continent. As one of them reported: "Of course, that is the sort of thing the Pope hears about us." He hesitated and then added: "But that is the sort of thing he likes to hear." When a Pope surrounds himself with cautious, curial bureaucrats, and promotes guardians of the institution rather than forward-looking men, he inevitably reaps the harvest of his own sowing.

This curial tendency becomes stronger in proportion as age makes a Pope weaker. John Paul's papacy did not escape from this rule, those at the periphery suffering most from the prevalence of bureaucracy over Spirit.

As Pope, John Paul II summed up much that was best in the history of the papacy and did it with a flourish that came from evident conviction and godliness. Yet his years as Pope belong, not to the beginning of an era, but to the end of one.

How a highly structured and centralised church across the globe faces the drama of a fast-changing world is a question postponed rather than answered by this pontificate. Perhaps in Latin America, the continent where most Catholics now live, the breath of the Spirit, creative of the future, may be discerned more clearly than in a tired old European church.

Father David Regan is a Holy Ghost missionary priest in Sao Paolo, Brazil.