Germany's liberal Catholics frequently clashed with their conservative pope. They disagreed on abortion and they disagreed with his rigid theology.

Most notably, during the 1990s, a major row broke out between the Vatican and the German Catholic Church over pregnancy counseling. German law required that any woman seeking an abortion had to first seek counseling, which was often provided by the Catholic Church. After the session, a church counselor would fill out the paper work needed for a woman to seek an abortion. The counseling angered Pope John Paul II and the Vatican ordered that the practice be stopped in 2000.

Despite the myriad cultural differences, there was still plenty of admiration and respect for John Paul II. On Monday, many editorialists express gratitude for the pope's role in ushering in the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism.

Musing on the "sorrow of the stubborn," the center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which is based in Catholic Bavaria, details the adversarial relationship between the pope and Germany. The pope valued Germany and visited this land of the Reformation three times. "Yet driven by his fear that German Catholics could sink into liberalism, consumerism and indifference," he upset Germans with the excommunication of Hans Kueng  and installations of conservative cardinals like Cologne's Joachim Cardinal Meisner. "At the high point of the debate over the pregnancy crisis (abortion) consultations," the paper adds, "the majority of German bishops and German Catholics disagreed with John Paul II." Initially, Germans were enthusiastic about the pope, but his strong actions and inflexibility bred disdain among Germans. Only in his final years did the pope gain greater respect by apologizing for the sins of his church and fighting against the Iraq War. The paper says Catholics should not ignore their differences with the pope but they should still mourn his passing.

The Handelsblatt editorial ruminates on the pope's "global successor." The financial daily exclaims that "the people of the world need the Catholic Church as an authority," especially since "the only other truly global institution, the UN," is having trouble clearing up its conflicts of interest. The new leader of the church will be forced to continue onward in the shoes of his predecessor, preserving human rights, confining conflicts and denouncing injustice. And he will have the strength of speaking for one-sixth of the world's population, a figure which is growing with the population of regions where the religion is strong -- in Latin America, Asia and Africa. For that reason, Handelsblatt proclaims that the Catholic Church of the future must champion developing countries and, as such, the pope could come from one of those countries.

Meanwhile, the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung countered two myths about the pope. In "Myth One: John Paul II was the pope of the youth," the paper argues that the pope's Woodstock-like World Youth Day happenings may have made him something of a pop star with young people. But that hasn't led to fuller churches or more priests. And never mind asking young people what they think about celibacy. In "Myth Two: The pope played a major role in the fall of the Wall," a far less clearly argued opinion, the paper agrees that the pope played an important role in ending communist rule in his native Poland and influenced political dissent among other East Bloc Catholics. However, in countries like Russia he was only "indirectly influential." Indeed, rather than showing gratitude, the Russian Orthodox Church has been aggressively staking out its own turn in recent years.

The pope's death moved the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to break from tradition. The cover page, a picture-less sea of text with extremely rare exception (Sept. 11, 2001, for example), shows a picture of John Paul II standing in a crowd, smiling. "Now, with the pope gone, many things have become less certain," the paper writes. "It would be wrong so soon after the death of a really great man of this Earth to criticize details of his leadership ... Slowly, we are beginning to realize who we have lost. The world has lost a great a just man," it concludes.

The tabloid Bild, on the other hand, which generally prefers pictures to words, dedicated more text than usual to its front-page story. "The last absolutist monarch has left us," the paper writes. "But it is not the ruler of the Vatican state who we will miss. We will miss the man who came from Poland. His moral authority, no matter whether we liked it or not." His battle for peace and human rights, irrespective of whether those in power liked it or not." The pope, the paper concludes, "was a rock in the stormy zeitgeist and he deserves the respect of our time."

The business daily Financial Times Deutschland sees a contradiction between the pope's conservatism on issues relating to the internal policies of the Catholic Church and his liberalism on external issues. His uncompromising stance against the use of condoms despite the HIV/AIDS crisis often hid the fact that he was the most liberal pope the church has seen so far -- at least when it came to his contacts with other religions. "John Paul II sought to reconcile with other world religions and made more progress than any other pope in this regard," it continues. "Whereas his predecessors saw their followers as 'heathens' in need of prosletyzation, the pope accepted the existence of other monotheistic religions as equal and declared them as partners," it adds. "He also apologized for mistakes made by the church in its past." After the Sept. 11 attacks, the pope demonstrably visited the centers of the Islamic world, showing support for Muslims. "He also contributed to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, not so much by action, as by being Polish," asserts the paper, referring to his role in building the self-esteem of the people of Poland and encouraging their fight against oppression.