Eleven years ago, I sat on the cobblestones of the Via della Conciliazione in Rome at midnight, playing cards and drinking scotch with Croatians and Koreans. We were in a throng of almost a million people waiting to attend the mass where John Paul II would be canonized. When he died in 2005, thousands shouted “Santo subito!” (Make him a saint!) around the Vatican. Now I could look around and see the diversity of the world church. There were Ghanaian women in fabulous traditional dresses made out of cloth featuring his face, Japanese men carrying his picture, Indian priests leading the rosary in Hindi, Mexicans carrying the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was a living embodiment of his dream of human unity, and of the deep love so many around the globe held for him.

It’s hard to overstate the influence of this pope on world history.