Like millions of Catholics, I love Pope John Paul II for his holiness, courage and intellect. But I didn't always have respect and affection for the Holy Father.

As a 9-year-old fundamentalist Protestant, I was vaguely aware that a new Pope had been elected — but I had little interest in what those half-pagan Catholics were up to. I experienced a similar sort of detached curiosity when John Paul was nearly killed by a gunman in 1981. Having cut my teeth on Jack Chick comics and similarly rabid anti-Catholic literature, I was mystified and irritated by the attention paid to the Pope. I was told that Catholics worshipped the man in Rome and that the Catholic Church believed he was incapable of sin. This hardly surprised me, considering that the Catholics I knew didn't read their Bibles or exhibit qualities you would expect from “true believers.”

As I grew older and started to explore theological traditions outside of fundamentalism, I was surprised to learn that Catholics didn't worship this or any other pope (or even Mary), nor did they think he was sinless. In fact, I met some Catholics who didn't care for John Paul at all, complaining he was “too conservative” and “rigid” and “traditional.” Those comments intrigued me, but I still couldn't fathom that intelligent people would allow some old man with a heavy accent living halfway around the world tell them what to believe and how to think.

It's difficult to locate the exact moment when I realized the papacy was not only a good thing but also a necessary and biblical one as well. First came the growing awareness that the current Pope, a man to whom I had never really paid attention, was not only a good man but also a great man of God. It continued with the startling recognition (aided, in large part, by reading the early Church Fathers) that the early Church was not Protestant or even democratic: It was Catholic and hierarchical.

I saw that the New Testament does not endorse an individualistic, “Jesus, the Bible and me” type of Christianity but a faith rooted in apostolic authority granted by Christ (Matthew 16:16-20, John 20:19-23) and passed on by the apostles to their successors (Acts 6:6, Acts 1:20-26, 2 Timothy 1:6). Historical and theological works helped answer related questions and fill in important details. These books included the Catechism of the Catholic Church, John Henry Newman's classic The Development of Christian Doctrine and a lesser-known work, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church by Hans Urs von Balthasar (made a cardinal by John Paul in the 1980s).

Reassessing my past criticisms of the papacy, I discovered a wealth of irony. I had once condemned the idea that a sinful man could make infallible statements, yet in many ways, as a non-Catholic, I implicitly believed in a host of my own “infallible” opinions and beliefs. I had once scorned the “fact” that Catholics mindlessly obeyed the pope's every word (how little I knew!), even as I hung on every sentence of certain teachers or pastors I had deemed worthy of my trust. I had disdained the pope's apparent power to change doctrine and dogma on a whim, even while I blithely ignored 2,000 years of tradition, theological acumen and wisdom. I realized that, for all the years I had laughed at the papacy, I had been making myself a pope and I was just one self-appointed pope among millions of others — each of us creating Christianity in our image.

It's a relief not being a “pope” anymore, and it's a joy to live during the pontificate of one of the greatest popes of all time. My only regret is that I didn't get to know the only true pope I've ever known a bit earlier in life.

Carl Olson, author of Will Catholics be ‘Left Behind’? and editor of Envoy magazine, writes from Eugene, Oregon.