“If the Church of the future knows John Paul II as ‘John Paul the Great,’ it will be for this reason: at another moment of peril, when barbarisms of various sorts threatened civilization, a heroic figure was called from the Church to meet the barbarian threat and propose an alternative. In the case of Pope Leo the Great (440-461), the barbarians in question were Attila and his Huns. In the case of Gregory the Great (590-604), the barbarians were the Lombards. In the case of John Paul II, the barbarism threatening civilization has been a set of ideas whose consequences include barbarous politics-defective humanisms that, in the name of humanity and its destiny, create new tyrannies and compound human suffering.”

p. 863 Witness To Hope The Biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel