'Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II' When: 8 tonight on ABC. 'Pope John Paul II' When: 9 p.m. Sunday and 8 p.m. Dec. 7 on CBS. Pope John Paul II in his own words For those who want to know the thoughts of Pope John Paul II but find his books and encyclicals overwhelming, "A Year With John Paul II: Daily Meditations From his Writings and Prayers" ($19.95, HarperSanFrancisco 2005) offers wonderful, readable insight into his mind. The book, with one short reading for each day of the year, was edited by the Rev. Jerome Vereb, a Passionist from Pittsburgh who formerly worked in the Vatican and knew the late pope. It offers selections from his best known speeches and writings, and from obscure works, such as letters he wrote as a college student under Nazi occupation and a talk on flowers he gave to florists in Italy. It even includes a passage from an address on the Eucharist that he had prepared for October but did not live to deliver. Pope John Paul was not a pithy writer. Excerpting paragraphs that make sense apart from long, complex passages around them is difficult. Father Vereb has done a great service in distilling short passages that reflect the vast arc of ideas put forth by one of the greatest moral thinkers and spiritual leaders of the age. -- Ann Rodgers, Post-Gazette staff writer

The epic life of the late Pope John Paul II was as fascinating during his first 58 years in Poland as during his 26-year pontificate.

Anyone trying to film that saga of childhood loss, Nazi barbarism, communist persecution, theological impact, geo-political leadership and global evangelization must take severe shortcuts. The hagiographic four-hour CBS miniseries "Pope John Paul II," which airs Sunday at 9 p.m. and Dec. 7 at 8 p.m., manages nevertheless to tell the story remarkably well. The edgier two-hour ABC movie, "Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II," which airs tonight at 8, was doomed by trying to do too much with too little time.

Given its failure to develop character later, ABC wastes valuable time on Karol Wojtyla's childhood. Thomas Kretschmann ("The Pianist") plays the ABC lead over a 60-year transformation. He looks too old in early scenes but has the ailing pope's gait down perfectly.

No script writer has been able to resist inventing a frustrated romance for the future pope, though if he had one, both he and the lady remained mum. While most speculation has focused on Polish actress Halina Krolikiewicz Kwiatkowska, ABC makes the unusual choice of Ginka Beer, a close Jewish friend whom he escorted to the train station when she presciently left Poland for Palestine in 1937. (The scene of Karol kissing Ginka onstage and wishing it was real is based on a story of a crush he allegedly had on another actress, Kasia Zak.)

Because the movie tries to cover too much ground, it will be incoherent for those who don't already know the story, and disappointing for those who do. Worse, it is off-key in its presentation of both minor and major passages of his life. Recalling the defeat of Naziism, the pope muses absurdly, "I completed my studies in a time of peace." In fact communist persecution of priests differed little from Nazi persecution. His archbishop sent him to Rome to keep him alive.

Although the ABC movie is called "Have No Fear," it rarely shows what John Paul had to be afraid of. The globetrotting, superstar pope is virtually always shown alone, as if he lived quietly at the Vatican surrounded by a few aides. The movie depicts him as a Polish nationalist, not a global evangelist. His sense of humor is largely missing, his love of youth -- and their love of him -- absent.

A scene in which he declares that he could never forgive a priest who had molested a minor contradicts the pope's own words. The sexual abuse scandal appears in both productions, although the matter was not as high profile in the Vatican -- then consumed with a crisis in Bethlehem -- as in the United States. The movies should have contrasted those perspectives.

The CBS miniseries is far more effective as drama and in portraying the man and his context. But the fact that it was made in collaboration with the pope's longtime personal secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, now of Krakow, and papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls, means that nothing about the CBS pope is open to question.

Cary Elwes ("The Princess Bride") plays him from college until his election as pope, when Jon Voight ("Runaway Train," "Midnight Cowboy") takes over. Both are superb. Again, liberties are taken with personal stories -- his lifelong Jewish friend Jerzy Kluger, who escaped wartime Poland to fight for the Free Polish troops, becomes a victim of Nazi arrest. But the broad themes show Pope John Paul as his closest aides saw him.

It opens with the pope walking in the Vatican, stopping to chat with people while his aides joke about running on "Wojtyla standard time."

We see the origins of World Youth Day and the overwhelming response it drew in Denver, after even some U.S. bishops thought it would fail on American soil. But his controversial moves to curtail liberal -- and radical -- theologians, are ignored.

In one of the most moving scenes, the athletic pope struggles to walk again after breaking his hip. The miniseries is literally at pains to show the value he placed on allowing the world to see his suffering and realize the value of the old and the handicapped.

"All that matters is that every step I take is toward peace and reconciliation," he says after learning he may have Parkinson's Disease. "Everyone is saying, 'Slow down.' Slow down? When there is ethnic cleansing in Bosnia? Genocide in Rwanda? This is a time when people need to see and feel the pope close to them."

It is in depicting that final point that the ABC film failed and CBS succeeds brilliantly. It would be impossible to understand, based on ABC, why a million young people from around the world camped in the streets of Rome to bid farewell to Pope John Paul, or why world leaders who could agree on little else braved the specter of terrorism to attend his funeral. If CBS does not explain why many Catholics criticized this pope, it does reveal why most of those who criticized him also loved him.

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