My "feelings" (and thoughts, btw!) about JPII are very ambivalent. He seems to have been a person of great piety himself, and I'm not sure that his ability to get such enthusiastic emotional responses among people was a bad thing. And his final days were a great witness of suffering and faith.
There are two things that bother me, though. One was his desire to recast all of Catholic theology in the model of VatII (which was not even a doctrinal council), producing a huge volume of writings that referred either to the documents of VatII or to his own writings, but rarely to the thought of the 2000 years of Christianity prior to that.
The other was the fact that, while some of the more heretical bishops were slowly replaced and things improved slightly on a diocese-by-diocese basis, he tolerated the massive destruction of the faith by those people theoretically charged with protecting it. The fact that Ireland, even after VatII and at the beginning of his reign, was truly Catholic and producing priests - and now, after 26 years of JPII and numerous untended scandals, has only one seminary and this year ordained only 1 man for the diocese of Dublin, is an example of this. He had a long time to reverse the course of things after VatII but he really didn't do much of anything about it, and I think many souls within the Church perished as a result.
In short, I find him a very confusing and contradictory figure. I notice that B16 has put a lid on the Santo Subito movement, and said that the matter won't be considered again for a few months, at least.
Re: the issue of supersessionism.
It seems plain to me that JPII's speech at the synagogue at Mainz was in no way authoritative as it was a speech to please the ears of men rather than God. The speech was also addressed to perfidels rather than believers.
Also, in the speech at least, he was addressing the Abrahamic covenant which it can be argued was not revoked. However, the Abrahamic covenant was clearly fulfilled in Christ and it NEVER contained any offer or promise of salvation.
The words "Old Covenant" refer invariably in Scripture to the Mosaic covenant and Mosaic Law by which Jews today claim to achieve their salvation. JPII seems to have subsequently confused these 2 covenants. But again, none of his commentary on the Jewish question was ever issued in an authoritative or binding form. It was generally words in speeches which expressed his opinion as a private theologian rather than any teaching in his capacity of Supreme Pontiff.
Nevertheless, there is very recent Magisterial teaching by Pius XII on the issue of supersessionism which is totally consistent with Catholic Tradition, and it could not be clearer:
“And first of all, by the death of our Redeemer, the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished; then the Law of Christ together with its mysteries, enactments, institutions, and sacred rites was ratified for the whole world in the blood of Jesus Christ...but on the Gibbet of His death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race. ‘To such an extent, then,’ says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, ‘was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from the many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as Our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom.’”
“On the Cross then the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death, in order to give way to the New Testament of which Christ had chosen the Apostles as qualified ministers; Trent, ch 1, 793: but not even the Jews by the very letter of the law of Moses were able to be liberated or to rise therefrom” (Mystici Corporis, 29-30).
It seems that the new Pope has a much better grasp of his mandate than did JPII:
"The power conferred by Christ to Peter and his Successors is, in the absolute sense, a mandate to serve. The authority to teach, in the Church, entails a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith. The Pope is not an absolute monarch, whose thought and will are law. On the contrary, the Pope's ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his word.
"He must not proclaim his own ideas, but constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to the word of God, in face of attempts to adapt and water down, as well as of all opportunism.....
..The Pope is conscious of being, in his important decisions, bound to the great community of faith of all times, to the binding interpretations developed through the Church's journey of pilgrimage,"
With respect to the Old Covenant and other religions, this is precisely where JPII failed.