For some religious affairs pundits, he will always be "The Man Who Never Got To Be Pope". Yet Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who officially retired last Sunday when saying Mass in Milan's Duomo for the last time as the city's cardinal, is much more than that.
Now aged 75 and like Pope John Paul II suffering from Parkinson's disease, Cardinal Martini plans to travel to the Holy Land to return to his first love, namely biblical studies. His retirement from the "pastoral government of the archdiocese" of Milan probably brings down the curtain on a decade and more of speculation (some would call it wishful thinking) by Church commentators that he might be the man to succeed Pope John Paul.
Even if technically his hat is still in the ring for another five years (until he reaches 80, the age at which cardinals are no longer eligible to vote in conclave), Cardinal Martini's retirement and ill health hardly help his electoral prospects.
There are many commentators, too, who would argue that, even in the fullest of his health and still in office, Cardinal Martini would never have made it anyway since he had been dubbed the great white hope of liberal Catholics.
There is, furthermore, the consideration that he is a Jesuit (a Jesuit has never been pope).
Being at the centre of insistent, often poorly informed international media speculation that he could be "the next pope" right throughout the 1990s, was generally a matter of amusement and bemusement for Cardinal Martini. Some years ago a senior Vatican-based Jesuit told me how Cardinal Martini himself had responded to a question about his "electoral prospects" when addressing a gathering of seminary students: "Adolescent fantasies", came the dismissive reply.
From Martini, the formidable intellectual and biblical scholar, impressive linguist, innovative pastor and an open-minded thinker, such a response was par for the course. He never was or is one to state the boringly obvious.
Time and again over the last 20 years, he has struck an original note in church affairs, be they Catholic Church, Christian Church or even inter-religious affairs. For example, there was his surprise address at the 1991 Vatican synod for Europe, subtitled "So that we may be witnesses of Christ who set us free".
As the subtitle suggests, that synod had more than a whiff about it of quiet triumphalism after the fall of east-bloc communism.
It was a synod too where many east European bishops, attending for the first time, told heart-rending stories. Bishop Rudolf Balaz of Banska Bystrica in Slovakia told of his seven years of forced labour in a car factory, Romanian Cardinal Todea spoke of imprisonment and torture, while Polish Bishop Josef Zycinski dismissed Marxism as "the eastern version of fascism".
The Polish bishop was enraged at Cardinal Martini's contribution, especially when he had called on the synod not to reject Marxism in its totality but rather recall its "positive aspects", especially with regard to the development of social doctrine over the last century.
Calls for a third Vatican council, for a reassessment of papal primacy, for a reshaping of the role of the laity (in particular of women) in the Catholic Church, for a planetary system of government that "would transcend national sovereignty", are just some of the many other original contributions made by Martini during the last two decades.
Nor has he been merely a provocative church thinker. His spirituality and pastoral effectiveness meant that for much of the last 20 years, in an age of ever more cynical disbelief in Italy, he not only brought young Italians back into the church but he also consistently made himself heard.
That same spirituality means that he has never been frightened of entering into dialogue with non-believers. (In the mid-1990s, he did so publicly in a memorable exchange with novelist Umberto Eco, published subsequently as Belief Or Non-Belief?
In an address at Boston University in February 1998, he spelt out much of his own basic credo when calling on Catholics to "offer a chair to the non-believer", adding: "There are, within each of us, two people - one a believer, one a non-believer. They quarrel and fight with each other.
"Why not help people discern between the two voices, not only by giving space to the believer but also to the non-believer? I don't distinguish between believers and non-believers.
" I distinguish between people who think and people who do not. I ask all of you to be people who think."