There have been a million encomiums to Pope John Paul II since his death. As a non-Catholic, non-Christian, sort-of-Jew, I’ve been thinking about him and trying to figure out why this pope’s passing caused me some sorrow. It certainly was not for his views on homosexuality, or contraception, or abortion. It seems to me that the tides of history will eventually erode the Church’s resistance to those changes and John Paul II’s adherence to those dated doctrine’s will be forgotten. What he will be remembered for, I believe, is the part he played in the dissolution of the Iron Curtain. And that’s what I think about when I think about him.

I was in a union for a couple of years in the late 80s: the only time I’ve ever been in a union. It was the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City Teacher’s Union, an affiliate of the NEA. It was a pretty good time to be in the teacher’s union, since they had just succeeded in securing significant raises for the teachers. In 1985, only a few years before I started teaching, the starting salary for a provisional teacher (one like me who didn’t yet have a Master’s degree) was in the $14,000 range. (That’s equivalent to about $25,000 today*) By the time I started in 1987, starting salary was $23,000 ($40,000 in today’s money.)

But the union wasn’t just about better salaries. The union had a bigger goal: the improvement of the horribly broken New York City school system. The mission of the union, which it always seemed to take pretty seriously while I was there, recognizes that

It felt good to be part of something big like that. My goals of helping kids in some of the poorest, most crime-ridden parts of the nation to learn so that they could take part in all that our society had to offer meshed well with the organization I was a part of.

And, an ocean away, another union was acting on a much grander scale to secure more than just better wages for its people. Solidarity was changing the world. With his ties to Poland, John Paul II encouraged the people of his home country to seek freedom and democracy. His visits to Poland were some of the largest crowds he ever drew, and with his support and the sacrifices of millions of Poles, my students and I were able to watch the tumbling of the dominoes and the beginning of the end of the corrupt Soviet empire.

It was a great experience for my kids, and the brighter ones quickly tied it in to their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences in the Civil Rights movement. It was a cool moment in my teaching career when one of the kids, who had previously written about the murders she’d seen in her neighborhood, wrote a piece where she discussed Pope John Paul II and Martin Luther King Jr, and concluded by saying, “Sometimes religion can do good things.” Indeed.

[UPDATED 4/21: Minor spelling corrections, title change to the correct title.]