Dear Concerned Citizen,

Unlike many of the people sharing their recollections of Pope John Paul II this week, I never had the honor of meeting him personally. My wife and I merely saw him from afar, as he blessed the crowd in St. Peter’s Square from his apartment overlooking us. Yet I felt that I knew him, in some way, and felt the loss personally when he died. He had been the pope since as long as I had been aware of popes’ existing. A Catholic who had grown up during his pontificate couldn’t help being influenced by him—even if, like me, he had not been a Catholic while he was growing up.

When I told a Protestant friend several years ago that I felt drawn toward the Catholic church, the first thing he asked me was whether I was being too influenced by John Paul II.

It was a good question. No robust Catholic faith is based on the impressiveness or the goodness of a particular pope. Indeed, Catholics have sometimes taken a perverse pride in the spectacular sinfulness of some of their popes—the Borgia popes are the most notorious. They flaunt their consciousness of that wickedness to disprove the slander that they worship the Pope.

My Protestant friend represented many Protestants, however, in recognizing that there was a lot about this pope that was inspiring. Never has there been a pope as respected by Protestants as John Paul II was.

There was, for one thing, his staunch defense of human rights. He defended them against Nazism and against Communism, which seems uncontroversial now since those two ideologies were defeated. But he also defended them against subtler evils such as abortion, euthanasia, and the biotechnological reduction of human lives to the status of commodities. As the “culture wars” progressed, especially in America, it became ever clearer that the Catholic church was the chief institutional proponent of the sanctity of human life. It was, indeed, among a very few institutions that tried to provide an account of the rational basis of traditional Judeo-Christian ethics.

Karol Wojtyla saw that the fundamental error of totalitarianism in both its “left-wing” and “right-wing” variants was to misread the nature of man—to fail to see his innate and ineradicable drive for dignity and for truth. It followed that there was an important cultural dimension to the resistance to totalitarianism. The Nazi occupiers were trying to erase Polish culture; he and his fellow actors and playwrights would do their part to preserve it. The Soviet occupiers required a population that accepted its lies—that there was no truth beyond what the Party was saying on any given day. The first step toward liberating the country was to proclaim the truth that men and women have God-given rights.

Resisting what the pope called the “culture of death” involved a continued insistence that freedom is grounded in moral truth. Here is one area where the pope’s formidable philosophical learning played a providential role. Where earlier generations of Christians had feared an overreliance on human reason rather than faith, he saw that much of our current malaise is rooted in a lack of confidence in reason. Too many of our brightest minds have decided, or rather assumed, that reason cannot yield definitive moral judgments about what constitutes the good life. A reason thus fenced in turns on itself, eventually coming to doubt whether any truths can be ascertained. In what was perhaps the crowning intellectual achievement of his papacy, the encyclical Fides et Ratio, the Pope vindicated the claims of reason by pointing it toward the higher end of wisdom.

The Enlightenment philosophers would never have been able to predict this strange historical inversion: The Catholic church had become a valiant defender of reason and democracy. Catholic progressives had wanted a church that accommodated the modern world. Catholic reactionaries had wanted one that rejected it. The pope sought a church engaged in the world, conserving what was most valuable about modernity by preserving its “pre-modern” faith.

It was not the pope’s contributions to the development of Catholic doctrine that led me to become a Catholic; nor was it the church’s intellectual and aesthetic heritage. It was, rather, that I decided—prompted, I believe, by the Holy Spirit—that the central claims of the Catholic church were true: that it was what it proposed to be.

Nor do I believe that Wojtyla’s papacy was without blemish. The church, including the Vatican, was culpably slow to recognize the gravity of the sex-abuse scandals; I suspect that the pope, used to a very different caliber of priest when he was formed in occupied Poland, found it hard to imagine that priests could behave as despicably as too many did.

But everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, recognized this pope’s personal sanctity and charisma. He was a servant of his people because he was, first, a servant of the Lord. The reason he could say, “Be not afraid,” was because he knew the Lord, who coined the phrase, had already redeemed the world. Everything would turn out right in the end—as I pray it is turning out for Wojtyla. For my part, I am glad to have been received into the Catholic church while he was guiding it.

He has been a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London and has appeared on various television political programs and on numerous radio talk shows. Mr. Ponnuru grew up in Kansas City and went to Princeton University.