And he regards Wojtyla's long experience with
totalitarianism as a training ground in the appreciation of republicanism, observing in this regard that «no Pontiff in
modern times has ever come to the See of Peter with greater personal devotion to the principles of civil liberties as the natural and revealed rights of man than has John Paul II.»
Witness to the collapse of an empire and the rise and fall of two brutal
totalitarianisms, he was at the vortex of world - historical events; in part because of what he had observed, he could never credit the nostrums by which so much of
modern opinion is sustained.