Pope John Paul II, who has died at the age of 84, will be remembered above all else for his efforts to reinvigorate the Catholic Church and for his role in the fall of the Soviet empire - an achievement that ushered in a new era of religious and political freedom. Yet the exceptionally long pontificate of this, the first Polish pope, will also go down in history as a period of paradox.

It began with the Vatican's contribution to the demise of the totalitarian regimes of Communist Europe but it ended with division in the Church as a revered but authoritarian pope refused to tackle what critics saw as crucial issues of reform. The deep conservatism of the man who had fought so hard for glasnost - openness - in the Soviet Union meant he was having none of it in his own Church.