Mark Shea posts a snippet from his, as yet unpublished I think, book on Mary, and I post a snippet from his snippet:

I once heard George Weigel remark that John Paul II seemed to him to be the most fearless person he'd ever met. But the source of the fearlessness was not John Paul's experiences under Nazi or Stalinist oppression. It was, said Weigel, because John Paul had really internalized the fact that the worst thing that could possibly happen had already happened: God had been murdered—-and God had brought Easter out of it. John Paul II knew he belonged to a race that had murdered God. He therefore believed in the reality of original sin (which is why he never tried to suggest that we could create Heaven on earth). Indeed, he had personally experienced and witnessed some of the worst horrors human sin has ever wrought. But he also believed in something deeper than sin: the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by which Jesus showed forth how completely He could save the human person from the destruction of sin. He believed in the Assumption of Mary, by which Jesus showed forth how completely He could glorify the human person in perfect freedom and love. In a word, John Paul knew the true dignity both of our origins and of our destiny and refused to let sin blot out that fact about us. While he acknowledged the mystery of sin, he never let sin name any person he met—even those who tried to murder him. He knew that though sin corrupts our humanity, it did not constitute our humanity. And because he knew where we came from, he knew where we were supposed to be going, because by the power of Christ Jesus, one of us is already there in Heaven, sharing fully in the glory of Christ.