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Muggeridge became a Catholic at last. So did many others, including myself.

Amen... Pope John Paul II had many faults -- after all he was just human, but the way in which God was glorified through this tool, this creature of God was a miracle by, yes God.

You have to visit Poland to see the magnitude of this man, meet a Pole who lived in the 80s to understand what the election of a Pole as Pope meant to them in 1979

In 1977 it seemed like communism would never end and all they could hope for was something lighter. But when a Pole was elected Pope, the first non-Italian in 400+ years, a shock when through the nation, a lightning bolt of fear went through the communist leadership both in Poland and in the Kremlin. For the communists knew that if Poland shrugged off communism, the house of cards would fall

And the communists in Poland knew that a forceful Pope could do that -- with no tank brigades

And the visit of Pope John Paul II to Warsaw immediately after his election is shown over and over again in the Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego (Museum of the Warsaw uprising), where you see Plac Piłsudskiego (Pilsudski square), the central place in Warsaw where there is the unknown soldier's tomb.

Pope JPII came and it seemed to those there that communism had disappeared. He repeated to the Poles and they remembered that their country is part of the Church and the Church is in their blood no matter what the leftists say.

And 5 years later in 1985, Solidarność came into the govt and in 1989, the wall fell and in 1991, the USSR fell.

This was a man of the hour, just as Pope Benedict is the man of the hour now

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But for me, the way in which God was glorified most in the Pope was in his final days, when the Pope, bent over, tired, struck by parkinsons, exhausted, still carried on -- how many times did we look at this old man, using his bishops staff as a walking aid (in comparison to the 80s when he seemed to handle it like a twig), this old man who did not seem to have the energy to move, far less to travel the world, how many times did we see this old man and realise that it was GOD who was carrying him, GOD who was His energy, GOD who was doing it -- to me it was apparent that the Pope was a display of how God can be our energy, our motivation, our actual physical, moral and spiritual guide.