It is intuitively obvious that the late John Paul II contributed
greatly to the peaceful collapse of communism in the last
quarter of the 20th century, but how? In the mountain of
memorial appreciations written about the Polish priest who
became pope, a column by Washington Post columnist Anne
Applebaum stood out. As the Warsaw correspondent for The
Economist in the late 1980s, Applebaum saw firsthand the
collapse of the Soviet system. She had real insight into how, as
pope, Karol Wojtyla had “helped overthrow communism.” There were
plenty of conspiracy theories going about in those days, she
noted, secret negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, that sort of
thing. But in fact, his contribution was far more mundane. In a
communist system in which the state claimed ownership, not just
of productive assets of the economy but of the truth itself, the
church, first in Poland and then elsewhere, “broke the two
monopolies, offering people a safe place to meet and
intellectually offering them an alternative way of thin