1. All three were shaped and grounded in a Christian faith tradition that informed how they lived and engaged human events.

2. Each was prepared to call evil by its right name, to refuse it legitimacy and to resist it.

3. Their understandings of human nature were grounded in the Imago Dei (or something very much like it) and its attendant dignity, in an understanding of human failings and of the possibility of redemption and remediation. For the pope, this translated into his encouraging Polish resistance. For Mrs. Thatcher, this meant offering ownership of council houses to the Britons who lived in them and ownership of shares in British companies as her government divested and privatized them. For Reagan, this defined his belief in the possibility of the Russian leadership’s following human goodness, against their totalitarian doctrines. And his foreign policy supported the efforts of those who were of like mind, intention and action.

4. John Paul understood where his responsibilities as pastor and preacher ended and the prudential judgment of political authority began. The church and its leaders may – no, must – speak to the state and to political authority, but they do not control the levers of state power.

5. In a post-9/11 world, there may not be an equivalent to the Reagan strategy of deterrence, at least not in the same way. That said, the need for SDI or something like it to protect human life from a nuclear threat or its equivalent is not lesser, but greater.

6. A struggle against any totalitarianism may well mean fighting a two-front battle:   the front based offshore and another at home. In addition to its foreign policy efforts, Western states funded such instruments as the Voice of America on the ideological front and to encourage those suffering under totalitarianism. From the beginning of the Cold War, Western Christians smuggled Bibles and support to the church behind the Iron Curtain. On the home front, Christians are still called to John Paul’s strategy of cultural resistance by engaging the culture of modernity with faith-integrated lives in family, in vocation and in the public square; and

7.No regime – no totalitarianism, “hard” or “soft” – is permanent.