News Analysis
WASHINGTON -- What will be the historic consequences for the Church of making John Paul II a saint? 
Probably, this decision guarantees defeat in advance to any future efforts that a group or an individual might launch, in the hope of undermining John Paul's legacy. 
  
Beatifications of various other popes are rather probable.  But there won't be such a number of these that the golden memory of John Paul II won't permanently retain more authority, more prestige, than any "more liberal" pope who might be set up against him as a rival.
 
On the other hand, the beatification of this modern pope, unconventional in certain obvious ways, must really tend to strengthen the hand of all the future popes for a century or part of a century.

A large number of other popes might be rather strong candidates for sainthood - notably the following five:  Blessed Innocent XI  (d. 1689), Pius VI  (d. 1799),  Blessed Pius IX  (d. 1878),  Venerable Pius XII  ( d. 1958),  and Blessed John XXIII (d. 1963).  
 
And, conceivably, one or more of these three:   Pius XI  -  d. 1939, Paul VI  -  d. 1978, and John Paul I  -  d. 1978        

To a serious historian, there might be something objectionable, really ambiguous in the attitude of Pius XII  -- but not at all for his not opposing Hitler. -
 
Au contraire, in the 1930s Pacelli notoriously played a critical role, maneuvering the USA into support for FDR's war on Hitler. His role was so decisive it may well have been a truly harmful factor --  awakening the German despair that inspired the Nazis' "final solution."
  U.S. opinion undoubtedly feared and hated being drawn into a war with Germany -  and American Catholic opinion was very like that of the country as a whole - until Pacelli openly intervened.  He visited America in 1936, showing great solidarity with the interventionist Roosevelt, while refusing to speak to any pacifist leaders  -  manipulating the Catholic vote in the huge Eastern and midwestern cities, and giving FDR the unexpected "landslide" which became his mandate for maneuvering his people into the coming war.

  It should be recognized that John Paul II's thousands of canonizartions and beatificatiions all derive from Blessed  John XXIII's openly avowed commitmenrt to naming very huge numbers of new saints.  That  was openly set up by John XXIII, starting just weeks after his election in 1958. 

  e)     possible theological basis for more unity than most people foresee between Catholics and Protestants.