I feel compelled to write something about Pope John Paul II.

I admit I didn’t follow the man’s life—forgive me—religiously, in large part because I am not a Catholic. But it seems impossible not to ponder this man’s life as he is being celebrated and mourned the world over. And indeed he loomed so large across a pretty healthy chunk of modern history—as Colin Powell noted, he was one of the first Information Age popes, the first to send an email, he lived in a time where the world has gotten so small that the shadow of the papacy grows that much larger—that it is impossible not to take some note, to have some sense of, the man.

Pope John Paul II was, I think indisputably, a great man. Greatness is a measure of magnitude, and I don’t know how you can hold the top position in a church of a billion people for 25 years without being, or becoming, a great man.

I think that he had something very much in common with Reagan, in that both survived early assassination attempts. John Paul II was shot not long after he succeeded John Paul I, who died after only a short time in the papacy; the survival coming on top of the short tenure of the predecessor served to give him a sort of aura of invincibility. It made him seem like a super hero (or, if you prefer a religious context, immortal, and so divine.) I think this colored the world’s perception of him as heroic; not that it made him falsely heroic, but rather that it made the world receptive, open to, “pre-sold on” it.

He was instrumental in the fall of Communism. He visited 179 countries and logged over 750,000 miles (as CNN keeps telling us, “three times the distance to the moon.”) I used to joke about how I was seeing the Pope at Giants Stadium (the kind of venue in which he would perform a mass or make an appearance)—“Bon Jovi opened.” He took controversial stands on Arab and Muslim issues, and this seems to have alienated many of my fellow Jews. But I can’t help thinking that he played it just right, even as I may not have liked some of it.

There were scandals under his papacy of course, tribulations that befell the Catholic Church. There remain great dividing issues—the role of women in the church; birth control, to name two. The ancient world perpetually clashes with the modern in the papacy, though, and I doubt that in this day and age there is any way to avoid controversy.

Ultimately, while personally I am not a religious person, I cannot help but be moved by the magnitude of this simple Polish man, and the swatch he cut through history. May God rest his soul.