"God doesn't know how to count. God doesn't reason in terms of numbers. If you want to assess this Holy Year, you have to thinks in terms of quality and not quantity."
Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, president of the Vatican's Grand Jubilee committee, is the speaker and he offered the response at a Vatican news conference earlier this week. The French Basque cardinal had been asked what significance he attached to the fact that nearly 25 million pilgrims visited Rome during the Holy Year, which officially ended last Saturday with the closing of the Holy Door in the Basilica of St Peter's by Pope John Paul II.
The cardinal's response is both logical and understandable. The quantitative aspect of this remarkable Holy Year is easily enough grasped. During the 379 days of the Holy Year, the Vatican organised 3,400 religious ceremonies linked to the jubilee. More than 8.5 million pilgrims met the Pope in large-scale audiences, while an estimated TV audience of 257 million in 80 countries watched some of the 400 hours of live coverage of jubilee events in Rome.
The numbers might sound impressive, but if numbers were the only yardstick by which to measure this Holy Year then it has be considered small fry by comparison with the 75 million Hindu pilgrims currently gathering on the banks of the Ganges for the first Kumbh Mela celebration of the third millennium.
God, however, does not know how to count, as the cardinal says. In truth, it is difficult to disagree with Cardinal Etchegaray and the jubilee's "secretary-general", Archbishop Crescenzio Sepe, when they claim the Holy Year was a profound success.
With the exception of a joint day of Jewish and Christian Prayer in October - cancelled because of the controversy provoked by Cardinal Ratzinger's hardline Dominus Iesus document - the Holy Year programme honoured all those objectives set out for it in November 1994 by the Pope in his apostolic letter Terzio Millennio Adveniente.
Starting with the symbolic opening of the Holy Door the Pope used the Holy Year to throw light on a wide variety of issues ranging from Third World debt relief to prison conditions worldwide, to the church's own sense of mea culpa for past wrongs, to the conflict in the Middle East.
Not for nothing was it that the Pope's most significant overseas visit of Holy Year took him to the Holy Land. Not for nothing did he hold an ecumenical prayer service at the basilica of St Paul's Without the Walls in Rome last January, a ceremony attended by representatives of 22 Christian churches.
Arguably the most remarkable event of the year was the World Youth Day of Prayer, held in August at Tor Vergata, on the outskirts of Rome, and attended by more than two million young people. If there is an undying televisual image of this Holy Year, it is that of the ageing, frail Pope John Paul II smiling and doing his best to "swing along" with the enthusiastic, rock-beat religious music that closed the ceremony.
Not for nothing, too, the Pope himself sets aside a special mention for the World Youth Day in his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, At the Close of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, issued last weekend.
"And how could we fail to recall especially the joyful and inspiring gathering of young people? If there is an image of the jubilee of the year 2000 that more than any other will live on in memory, it is surely the streams of young people with whom I was able to engage in a sort of very special dialogue," he writes.
Not for the first time in his remarkable pontificate, the 80-year-old Pope showed throughout this Holy Year that, notwithstanding his all-too-obvious physical frailty, he remains a charismatic presence capable of using every technological means available to preach his evangelical message. When U2's Bono described him as "the greatest showman" during a memorable meeting at Castelgandolfo in September 1999, he was paying no idle tribute.
Typically, too, Pope John Paul closed the Holy Year with an apostolic letter that seeks to both maintain the Holy Year's momentum while also looking forward to the new millennium. In his conclusion to Novo Millennio Ineunte, the Pope writes something that might well sum up not just this Holy Year but indeed his whole pontificate:
"Let us go forward in hope . . . The Son of God is at work even today . . . Did we not celebrate the jubilee year in order to refresh our contact with this living source of hope? Now the Christ whom we have contemplated and loved bids us to set out once more on our journey: `Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' (Matthew, 28:19)."