'Be not afraid"; "be not afraid" - the injunction is a mantra, repeated more than 10 times in the opening few pages of Pope John Paul II's 1994 bestselling book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, writes Eddie Holt
"Of what should we not be afraid?" the Pope asked rhetorically on page five. His answer: "We should not fear the truth about ourselves." The Pope's funeral was a splendid spectacle. As a media event it was Italian opera on the grandest scale. It had elaborate choreography: the pomp of states and churches in which those Byzantine and North African Christians were sublime in contrast with the Pope's aptly plain wooden coffin; the backdrop of St Peter's in the "Eternal City" of Rome; the proportions of it all.
It looked like the globalised world (albeit overwhelmingly the white male Christian world) had gathered in homage to a last white emperor, a departed Caesar, indeed a demigod.
Ironically, the Pope could be treated as a symbolic emperor precisely because he too continued to lack the battalions for which Joe Stalin allegedly mocked Pius XII, who had criticised the Soviet dictator.
Even the wannabe military emperor of the world, George Bush, who does command formidable battalions, was among the mourners. Bush, like his father, had clashed with the late Pope over attacking Iraq. It used to be said about the Anglican Church that it was "the Tory party at prayer" ; this was the world's white establishment on its knees at a funeral.
Most retrospectives on the Pope's visit to Ireland in 1979 acknowledge that it marked a final high point but not a renewal for Catholicism here. It occurred during a decline which a decade or so later became precipitous and then catastrophic. His funeral last week may come to be seen as marking a final high point before a further decline of European Christianity.
Alternatively, there could be a Catholic renewal. It seems unlikely, however.
The chasm between secular life and Catholic teaching is too often unbridgeable. Each side, religious and secular, may blame the other for this but while Europe seems likely to remain culturally Christian, traditional religious adherence looks set for continued decline.
That is why those football-like chants of "Giovanni Paolo, Giovanni Paolo" sounded not only dubious (it was a funeral, after all!) but eerie. No doubt they were sincere, heartfelt and youthfully apposite to those chanting them.
But so too was the Maynooth seminarians' creepy rendition of He's Got the Whole World in His Hands when Pope John Paul visited in 1979.
Perhaps "eerie" and "creepy" seem too stark. Young people, after all, of whom the late Pope spoke much, are often idealistic and energetic if hideously libidinous creatures. They can't, of course, be utterly without restraint - that's just barbarism - but worship of an elderly Pope seems even more suspicious than vacuous adulation for a pop star, sports star or media-made icon of cool.
Pope John Paul II was, in ways, a media-made pontiff. In an increasingly secular western world, he was a celebrity cleric and adulation of him undoubtedly incorporated a valid youthful yearning for a more spiritual world.
Yet the flag-waving, the football-like chanting and the Woodstock-ish mass (or Mass?) gathering appeared as profoundly superficial and inauthentic elements.
Maybe it was the awkward grafting-on of such pop-culture elements to staples of high-culture Renaissance Christian Europe that gave the event an underlying ersatz quality. Whatever the reason, it looked splendid but felt unreal.
There was sadness for the passing of an influential figure but there was sadness too for what felt like obsequies for the traditional Christian West.
As at most funerals, people who are genuinely saddened are saddened for themselves as well as for the dead person. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee," wrote John Donne in 1624. That bell on St Peter's Basilica last week tolled not just for a dead Pope but for doctrinal aspects of the white Christian world of which Ireland, for centuries, has been a part.
Disputes over Pope John Paul II's influence will continue. It's rewriting history to say he caused the collapse of communism (Mikhail Gorbachev did that) but he did contribute to its demise. He was unable to prevent the Bushes from attacking Iraq despite denouncing the "savage-capitalism" of the US. In Europe, most Catholics ignored his pronouncements on birth control.
Peculiarly in the West, he - spiritual leader of a billion people and the wealthiest church on the planet - was an ultimate celebrity figure. Despite being fêted by the wealthy white world, he didn't have real power there. He was a second world man, fêted publicly by elements in the first and third worlds but whose teachings were rejected in the first and forced upon the third.
That too is why his funeral may repeat the outcome of his 1979 visit here.
Still, his injunction to "be not afraid" remains apposite. Globalisation won't mean continued Western (US) dominance and Europe knows it. Perhaps that is the "truth about ourselves". We can already see history's most travelled Pope was frantically racing against time and the globalising he was ironically furthering.