What is the difference between the Pope and an ordinary man? One kisses women and walks on the ground, and the other. . .So went the sneering joke among the sneering, right-on classes of Ireland half a generation ago about perhaps the greatest man of the 20th century.
This, of course, was the very class which had flirted with the Stalinism of the Soviet Union and which so disliked the Pope's loathing of tyranny: throw in some half-baked notions of the Pope being a misogynist and you have the perfect hate-figure for the salonistas of Irish life.
The Pope's final journey towards death came on the very day of the 60th anniversary of the "liberation" of Danzig, Gdansk, by Soviet troops in 1945; and it was in Gdansk, under his influence, that the destruction of Soviet Communism began, 35 years later. Another 25 years on, the Poland which the Pope saw enslaved twice over is free and 50,000 of its free citizens now give us the benefits of their labour. This is the new Poland, the free Poland whose "Grom" special forces of frogmen and airborne soldiers, under Colonel Roman Polko, so brilliantly disabled Iraqi plans to sabotage the entire maritime Basra oilfields two years ago.
Of course, the Pope was utterly opposed to the war, and naturally, for he was not an obedient chaplain about some military crusade, but the leader of a worldwide church. However, like all Poles, he knew the meaning of tyranny, and knew that it had to be opposed by the threat of physical force; so not for him the denunciations of Nato which we have heard so much from the ideological neutralists in our midst. For tyranny does not recognise neutrality, only vigorous resistance or obliging victimhood, and the Pope always resolutely declined to accept the latter.
Few Catholics today would agree with many of the Pope's opinions on sexuality. He clearly was a man of austere self-regulation who did not understand how the rest of us really are. But as an exemplar of moral fortitude he was a giant, his reputation pure, unsullied and unsulliable. However, his are not the ways of the world around him, and one unfortunate characteristic of his pontificate - like that of all before it - was a wholly unreal expectation of how modern human beings should actually attend to their sexual urges.
This does not mean he was invariably wrong in his pronunciations on sexuality, for no pope has ever so specifically and repeatedly denounced the sexual objectification of women - for which, of course, he got little or no thanks from the sisters.
Most tellingly, it was while he actually was Pope that he discovered the significance of two 19th-century Catholic theologians: Antonio Rosmini and John Henry Cardinal Newman. What other but a truly great man embarks, in his sixties, upon a course of scholarship over a marginalised Italian thinker whose works had been banned by the Vatican and an English homosexual convert from Protestantism? Yet these two men - from God alone how many others he must have read, and in so many languages - became his intellectual inspirations.
Europe was the sole begetter of world - rather than localised - civilisation because of its Christian heritage. In its post-Christian, secular vanity, against the wishes of the late Pope, it has chosen to exclude that central and defining historical truth from its Constitution, as if for the past 1,500 years, social democracy has been in the forefront of the European mind. Yet secularism is the invention of Christian societies; and secularism without the moral spine of Christ's teaching and the inspiration of the Sermon on the Mount is like a welfare state without any taxpayers to sustain it.
The post-Christian, feminist, rights-obsessed, myopic society which is in the ascendant across Europe is on its demographic death-bed. Yet we decline to contemplate the consequences of our current social practices, which are less trends than cultural mass-migrations away from common sense. And great though the Pope might have been, he was unable to break the prevailing secularist dogmas about individual rights. So regardless of his theological justifications, he is anthropologically correct: a society which exalts contraception and abortion over its need to reproduce itself is doomed. This is a truth which secularists deny with the same intellectual validity of the skipper of the Titanic rebutting the idea that there could be an iceberg ahead.
Pope John Paul II was not the only reason why Communism fell: without the might of the US after the second World War, the commissars would sooner or later have been in Achill. But in the final quarter of the 20th century, it was the belief that he gave the Polish people which provided the cutting-bit to the lever that was slid under the steel plate of Soviet tyranny. And the wretches in the Kremlin, faced with his adamantine resolution, realised that they had no legitimacy: in the cold watches of the night, they knew their authority was a sham, based on bullying and bluff.
Yet this obvious truth was not so obvious in the 1980s, when among the fashionable salonistas of Ireland - who are so silent about their former opinions today - the hate figures of the world were not the KGB or Pol Pot but Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. These two men confronted the might of the Soviet Union, and finally provided the answer to the question quoted by Mark Steyn yesterday, which was asked by Stalin just 70 years ago, in May 1935: "The Pope! How many divisions has he got?"