For the 2,000-year-old papacy, history's longest succession of power, the 20th century began with Leo XIII being carried on a portable throne around the Vatican, which he looked upon as his prison.

At the advent of the year 2000, the papal century reaches its apex with John Paul II, a million-kilometer jet-setting pope with pop star magnetism who has journeyed by popemobile, helicopter and supersonic Concorde to every corner of the world that he looks upon as his home parish.

The nine popes who occupied the throne of Peter in this century witnessed enormous advances in science and technology. But they also coped with the unparalleled human suffering wrought by two world wars, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, Soviet purges and almost ceaseless political, religious, ethnic and tribal slaughter.

Leo XIII was 93 when he died in 1903. He had reigned more than 25 years, longer than any of his successors this century. A skilled diplomat, Leo was preoccupied with regaining the papal states lost to the "Risorgimento," the surging nationalist movement that united Italy.

Pius IX, his predecessor, began the voluntary papal imprisonment when Victor Emmanuel marched into Rome and made it his capital. Pius refused to recognize the new Italy. At his funeral, irate nationalists tried to dump his body in the Tiber.

Despite the continuing isolation, Leo XIII won international respect by mediating a dispute between Spain and Germany and skillfully persuading Chancellor Otto Bismarck to curb anti-Catholic laws that closed seminaries, expelled the Jesuits and imprisoned many German priests.

Leo XIII created hundreds of new dioceses in Africa, India, Japan and the Americas. But like John Paul II at the end of the century he decried certain movements to adapt church doctrine to contemporary culture. At the same time, this scholarly pontiff, a Dante expert, opened the Vatican archives to scholars regardless of creed.

"The church has no secrets," he declared.

As the industrial revolution spawned sweatshop mills and factories, he became known as "The Workers' Pope," for handing down encyclicals insisting on their right to a just wage and to organize unions.

His successor, Pius X, softened the Vatican's stance against the Italian nation. He opposed "modernism" even more vigorously, branding it the "synthesis of all heresies." John XXIII when he became pope in 1958 found himself on a Vatican list of prelates suspected of "progressive tendencies."

Although he owed his election to the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Josef's veto of the favorite candidate, Pius X abolished interference in papal elections by Catholic monarchs. He labored to avert Europe's headlong rush toward World War I, which broke out a few days before his death.

Pius X was canonized 40 years after he died, the first papal saint since Pius V, who excommunicated England's Queen Elizabeth in 1570.

On Benedict XV fell the burden of dealing with Catholic countries arrayed on opposite sides in World War I, each claiming a just war and praying for victory.

His declared neutrality and repeated protests against inhuman weapons like poison gas angered both sides. The pontiff strove to aid war's innocent victims and offered a seven-point peace plan. It failed, but most of his proposals were included in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points.

Muslim Turkey erected a statue to Benedict in Istanbul, honoring him as "the benefactor of all people, regardless of nation or creed."

Pius XI ended six decades of papal self-imprisonment in 1929 by signing the Lateran Treaty with Benito Mussolini which created the 108-acre Vatican state. Two years later he infuriated Il Duce by issuing an encyclical condemning fascism.

His 1937 encyclical "Mit Brennender Sorge" - With Burning Anguish - denounced Nazi racial doctrines as anti-Christian. Adolf Hitler had all copies suppressed in Germany.

Pius XII, who was elected pope as World war II broke out, tried to be more diplomatic in dealing with the war's increasing horrors, a stance that cast a lingering shadow over his papacy.

A former nuncio to Germany, he feared that condemning Hitler would endanger Catholics drafted into the Axis forces and bring on even more barbaric repressions than Bismarck's. With three cardinals and thousands of priests and nuns imprisoned in Communist eastern Europe, he also saw the Third Reich as a bulwark against atheistic Communism.

At his direction Jews were hidden in hundreds of Roman churches and convents and inside the Vatican walls. He ordered gold church vessels melted down to help Jews meet a Nazi extortion demand for a million lire and 100 pounds of gold. Bombs dropped near the Vatican railway station were seen as a warning from Hitler to stop hiding and helping Jews.

But even as 1,000 Jews were rounded up in Rome for extermination, the austere, aloof pontiff withheld condemnation. By the time Pius XII finally denounced Nazism as "a satanic spectre," Hitler was dead in his Berlin bunker.

John XXIII, a genial extrovert nicknamed "John the Jolly," was 77 when he ascended the papal throne, almost as old as is the now-ailing incumbent. "Vaticanisti," as veteran media pope watchers are called, saw him as an interim pope. They were in for a shock.

Within three months of his election he announced a general council, summoning 2,500 bishops from around the world to "throw open the windows" of the church and rid it of medieval trappings. Protestant and Orthodox clergy sat in as observers.

The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, brought about sweeping changes, decentralizing church bureaucracy, replacing Latin with native languages in the liturgy, inviting discourse with Christian churches separated from the Holy See.

Ignoring the Cold War, John XXIII instigated a benign revolution in Vatican foreign policy, viewing "irresponsible capitalism as hardly less of a menace than Communism." Son of a peasant farmer, he charmed world leaders and the world at large with his rustic common sense and infectious humor.

Asked by a council theologian how many people worked at the Vatican, he gave the famous reply: "About half of them."

Vatican II had completed only its first of four sessions when John XXIII died. Paul VI guided the council to its conclusion, suffering the alienation of traditionalists who deplored the changes and liberals who complained they had not gone far enough. The aftermath saw thousands of priests and nuns give up their vows.

Paul VI greatly internationalized the church by increasing the number of cardinals from 87 to 137, appointing many from emerging nations. He journeyed to the Holy Land to meet the Patriarch of Jerusalem, to New York to address the United Nations and to India, Uganda, Colombia and Manila where he escaped an assassin's dagger.

He startled the conservative Curia by inviting women religious leaders to join the Council observers and named Sts. Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena the first women doctors of the church.

But Paul VI saw his popularity shattered and his authority diminished when, against the majority advice of a pontifical commission, he issued "Humane Vitae," his encyclical banning artificial birth control. As declining birth rates in Catholic countries showed, the faithful widely ignored the ban, which parish priests now rarely mention from the altar.

John Paul I, a surprise conclave choice, had one of the shortest pontificates on record. Thirty-three days after his election, he was found dead of a heart attack in the papal bedroom, his reading light still on. Lack of an autopsy fed baseless rumors that like a dozen of his predecessors over the centuries he had been poisoned or suffocated.

Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was the first non-Italian elected pope in more than 450 years and the first from beyond the Danube. A multilingual charismatic figure who had survived Nazi and communist regimes, he took the name John Paul II.

He had studied for the priesthood while hiding out from S.S. squads rounding up forced laborers in Krakow. As a parish priest and bishop he outwitted Soviet-trained commissars to keep the faith strong in Poland.

A mountain climber and expert skier who vacationed in the Italian Alps until he broke his hip five years ago, this pastoral pope has treated the world as his parish. He has visited 118 countries and in a celebrity-crazed century has been seen live in more places by more people than any statesman, sports figure or rock star.

A third of Ireland's and half of Poland's population came out to see him. Five million knelt for his blessing on a dusty field in Manila. Earlier this year, 1.2 million attended his Mass at a Mexico City auto speedway.

The influence of this unlikely pop idol has ranged far beyond his travels. Czech President Vaclav Havel, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, among many, regard John Paul II as a key player in the fall of European Communism and the Berlin Wall. As a peace mediator, he averted a war between Chile and Argentina. He recognized the state of Israel and then Jordan.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev asked for his blessing. Cuba's Fidel Castro forsook jungle fatigues and wore a dark business suit to attend his Mass in Havana. He has had historic meetings with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury and four U.S. presidents, most recently in St. Louis with Bill Clinton.

Progressive on social issues but unyielding on church doctrine, John Paul II has sought to implement the decrees of Vatican II while curbing innovative excesses. In a 21-year reign seldom free of controversy, he has taken on the Jesuits, the Mafia and even the United Nations, defeating a proposal at a Cairo population conference that he perceived as global endorsement of abortion.

He has denounced apartheid, anti-Semitism, euthanasia and capital punishment, but disappointed liberals by upholding clerical celibacy and shutting off debate on the ordination of women.

He also took on Hollywood, decrying film violence at a meeting with the movie moguls on the Universal lot. Here this published poet and playwright spoke almost as an insider - Burt Lancaster starred in the movie version of his play "The Jeweler's Shop."

On long plane trips, John Paul II wrote on yellow legal pads "Crossing the Threshold of Faith." The book led the New York Times best seller list for weeks and was a runaway success in 21 languages.

He brought about the first revised Catholic catechism since the Council of Trent in the 16th century. The U.S. edition sold an astonishing 2 million copies in hardback.

Traveling ceaselessly for more than two decades has taken its toll. John Paul II has survived an assassin's bullet fired from 20 feet, undergone surgery to remove an orange-sized tumor, had a hip replacement after a bathroom fall and now, just past his 79th birthday, exhibits the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

His speech is slurred. His left hand trembles. Stooped over, he walks painfully leaning on a cane. Still, this most remarkable of all popes in the 20th century journeys on, determined to lead a revitalized church into the Third Christian Millennium.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Hugh Mulligan has covered the conclaves of cardinals in Rome that elected the last three popes, beginning with Paul VI. He has accompanied John Paul II on more than two dozen of his journeys about the globe, including his first visit to Poland as pope and his meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana.

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