The others

lo splendido e impeccabile Obituary del Guardian su Papa Giovanni Paolo II. come diceva un tempo Rocca, da staccare e conservare... (altri interessanti commenti e anlisi del pontificato qui e qui e qui)

The word "restoration" was used to describe the goal of his pontificate on his first visit to the United States, in 1979. He was never very happy about the US, seeing in it a hotbed of subversion, where "radical feminist nuns" vied for the headlines with gay priests. The 1990s scandal of paedophile clergy only confirmed his impression of a degenerate society in which Catholicism had lost its way.
Paul VI, although not widely regarded as a liberal, was the friend of liberals, and kept open some doors that John Paul quickly closed. Paul was ecumenically minded and sought genuinely to better relations with other Christians. John Paul made some rhetorical concessions early on, but soon showed that he regarded his office as an asset for Christian unity: all the problems would be resolved if only others would recognise the need for a return to his authority.
Many will remember John Paul II for his pronouncements on sexual matters. He endorsed everything that Paul VI had said, but sharpened it to an extraordinary degree. Catholics who practised artificial birth control, he said in 1984, were "denying the sovereignty of God", thus becoming, in effect, atheists. This illiberal doctrine surfaced again in the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, and the moral absolutes it laid down shaped the intransigence of the Holy See at the 1994 UN conference on population and development in Cairo. There was no space for debate or dialogue. ....
So, one by one, John Paul alienated the people he needed to have on his side in his grand project of a "second evangelisation". The Jesuits, with 23,000 members still the world's biggest male religious order, were the first to feel the lash. ... The attempt to redirect the Jesuits failed, as did subsequent interferences with the Franciscans, and with the Carmelite nuns, who were ordered to return to their antiquated rule despite a majority vote for change. .... It was the new movements - such as Opus Dei and Comunione e Liberazione - that John Paul thought embodied the charisms once possessed by the established orders. On the whole, John Paul thoroughly and needlessly offended theologians. John Paul did not carry with him theologians and women, and many others, all of the time. He was a paradoxical and often unpredictable figure. If his pontificate is to be deemed a failure, it was a very Polish failure, on a vast, magnificent, heroic scale, conducted with zest and panache, comparable to those mythical Polish cavalrymen charging the German tanks in 1939. One admires the dash of it, while wondering whether it was quite the best thing to do.