"The Great Unifier," 4/4/05

In his decades of work for the op-ed page and other high-profile venues, Brad Holland has rarely produced an illustration without a dark cast to it, both visual and psychic. This smoky, mottled portrait of JPII—accompanying not just Prof. Pelikan's article, but a whole page of mullings on the Pope's life—is more benign than Holland usually gets, if not quite reverent. It eloquently alludes to the Pope's benevolent warrior aspect, the trait that seems to have made him so emotionally powerful and hard to assess.