The elders admonish us from speaking ill of the dead, but the pope was a horrible disaster for the Church. Under his reign the Church COLLAPSED in the West. This wasn't a decline but a major collapse. Not only are there so many fewer practicing Catholics, thousands of entire parishes are closing, there is an incredible shortage of priests and even nuns, parochial schools are shutting down at an incredible pace, and let's not even mention the sex scandals.
Anyway most Catholics in the West don't even pay much attention to the teachings of the Church anyway. He is a symbolic celebrity like princess Diana. Some people liked the guy but he had little impact on their lives. And what about the overblown emphasis on his throngs of followers. I've seen this with many a rock star before. Anyway, the televangelist Benny Hinn draws crowds of millions, but who pays attention to him?
Then there's the so-called growth of the Church in the third world. That's due to the growth of the population in the third world. Islam is growing at a quicker rate and so is evangelical Christianity. As for the fall of Stalinism, that had NOTHING to do with the pope, as surely as it had nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher. By 1979 even the Stalinists didn't believe in state-controlled economies anymore. The end of the system was an objective process primarily.
So the hoopla about the great John Paul II is just that: hoopla. His papacy was a disaster. He was a reactionary man leading an institution that has been reactionary since the freaking Reformation