Willing or not, ready or not, we are all involved in an all-out, no-holds-barred, three-way global competition. Most of us are not competitors, however. We are the stakes. For the competition is about who will establish the first one-world system of government that has ever existed in the society of nations. It is about who will hold and wield the dual power of authority and control over each of us as individuals and over all of us together as a community; over the entire six billion people expected by demographers to inhabit the earth by early in the third millennium.

The competition is all-out because, now that it has started, there is no way it can be reversed or called off.

No holds are barred because, once the competition has been decided, the world and all that's in itâour way of life as individuals and as citizens of the nations; our families and our jobs; our trade and commerce and money; our educational systems and our religions and our cultures; even the badges of our national identity, which most of us have always taken for grantedâall will have been powerfully and radically altered forever. No one can be exempted from its effects. No sector of our lives will remain untouched.

The competition began and continues as a three-way affair because that is the number of rivals with sufficient resources to establish and maintain a new world order.

Nobody who is acquainted with the plans of these three rivals has any doubt but that only one of them can win. Each expects the other two to be overwhelmed and swallowed up in the coming maelstrom of change. That being the case, it would appear inescapable that their competition will end up as a confrontation.

As to the time factor involved, those of us who are under seventy will see at least the basic structures of the new world government installed. Those of us under forty will surely live under its legislative, executive and judiciary authority and control. Indeed, the three rivals themselvesâand many more besides as time goes onâspeak about this new world order not as something around a distant corner of time, but as something that is imminent. As a system that will be introduced and installed in our midst by the end of this final decade of the second millennium.

What these competitors are talking about, then, is the most profound and widespread modification of international, national and local life that the world has seen in a thousand years. And the competition they are engaged in can be described simply enough as the millennium endgame.

Ten years before this competition became manifest to the world at large, the man who was destined to become the first, the most unexpected and, for some at least, the most unwelcome competitor of all in this millennium endgame spoke openly about what he saw down the road even then.

Toward the end of an extended visit to America in 1976, an obscure Polish archbishop from Krakow by the name of Karol Wojtyla stood before an audience in New York City and made one of the most prophetic speeches ever given.

“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through,” he said, “â¦ a test of two thousand years of culture and Christian civilization, with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights and the rights of nations.” But, he chided his listeners on that September day, “wide circles of American society and wide circles of the Christian community do not realize this fullyâ¦.”

Perhaps the world was still too immersed in the old system of nation-states, and in all the old international balance-of-power arrangements, to hear what Wojtyla was saying. Or perhaps Wojtyla himself was reckoned as no more than an isolated figure hailing from an isolated country that had long since been pointedly written out of the global power equation. Or perhaps, after the industrial slaughter of millions of human beings in two world wars and in 180 local wars, and after the endless terrors of nuclear brinksmanship that have marked the progress of the twentieth century, the feeling was simply that one confrontation more or less wasn't going to make much difference.

Whatever the reason, it would seem that no one who heard or later read what Karol Wojtyla said that day had any idea that he was pointing to a competition he already saw on the horizon: a competition between the world's only three internationally based power structures for truly global hegemony.

Â·Â Â Â Â·Â Â Â Â·

An isolated figure Karol Wojtyla may have been in the fall of 1976âat least for many Westerners. But two years later, in October of 1978, when he emerged from the Sistine Chapel in Rome as Pope John Paul II, the 263rd successor to Peter the Apostle, he was himself the head of the most extensive and deeply experienced of the three global powers that would, within a short time, set about ending the nation system of world politics that has defined human society for over a thousand years.

It is not too much to say, in fact, that the chosen purpose of John Paul's pontificateâthe engine that drives his papal grand policy and that determines his day-to-day, year-by-year strategiesâis to be the victor in that competition, now well under way. For the fact is that the stakes John Paul has placed in the arena of geopolitical contention include everythingâhimself; his papal persona; the age-old Petrine Office he now embodies; and his entire Church Universal, both as an institutional organization unparalleled in the world and as a body of believers united by a bond of mystical communion.

The other two contenders in the arena of this “greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through” are no mean adversaries. Rather, they are the leaders of the two most deeply entrenched secular powers, who stand, in a collective sense, on their record as the authors and the primary actors in the period of history that has been so much the worst of times that the best face we can put on it is to say that we were not swallowed up in the apocalypse of World War IIIâas if that were the best man could do for his fellowman.

The first of those two powers, the Soviet Union, is now led by John Paul's most interesting adversary and a fellow Slav. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was as unexpected and unpredicted a leader in the new world arena as Karol Wojtyla himself. A husky man still in his prime, hailing from the obscure industrial town of Privolnoye in the southwest of Russia, Gorbachev is now what he was groomed to be: Master of the Leninist-Marxist Party-State whose power and standing in the community of nations was built upon seventy years of physical and spiritual fratricide carried out in the name of a purely sociopolitical vision and a thoroughly this-worldly ideology.

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