People all over the world are puzzled at the extraordinary response to the death of an 84-year-old pontiff, writes Breda O'Brien.
The sheer number of pilgrims who descended on Rome is frankly baffling, and the fact that so many were young would not have been predicted even five years ago.
Some people have tentatively compared it to the reaction to the death of Princess Diana, if only because St Peter's Square sprouted thousands of mini-shrines with candles and flowers, just as London did in 1997.
However, in many ways the two events are completely different. When Diana died, people grieved for a lost soul, for a woman who never seemed quite at ease or happy despite wealth and opportunity. This Pope died with no material possessions of his own, but he died serenely. With Diana, all people could talk about was the waste. John Paul spent himself, so that every moment of his life was lived to the full, so that along with the grief, there was a sense of completion.
Diana was beautiful. Pope John Paul was old, his face had frozen into a Parkinson's mask, and the only beauty he had was the kind Yeats referred to in Sailing to Byzantium:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and
louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
John Paul's soul sang, and sang ever more clearly the more his body declined.
Comforting though it would be, I do not think we can read the death of Pope John Paul as some kind of Catholic revival. It certainly is accurate to say that his death allowed some closet Catholics to emerge into the light, blinking a little sheepishly.
It became more acceptable to be Catholic when the whole world cried at the death of its spiritual leader. Meanwhile, those who have assumed that prosperity and increased knowledge would cause the religious quest to slowly wither away, have had to struggle to catch up with the rather obvious fact that it has not gone away.
I think the Irish media on the whole did a fine job, but might have done an even better one if they had not considered things like novenas a non-story for years.
The novenas tap into exactly the same existential needs of human beings as the Pope did. Novenas create a structure in which people can express those needs in rituals, and allow people to feel a sense of solidarity with each other. The fact that thousands of people take part in them every year was written off as a remnant of old Ireland, whereas in fact novenas allow people a communal forum for human needs made even more acute by the pressures of new Ireland.
John Paul left behind him in Europe a small cohort of deeply convinced people, who probably have an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Some of them are conservative; some are radical. Most of them defy lazy categorisation, as John Paul himself did.
However, the people who queued patiently for 12 or more hours are far from all being signed-up Catholics. In theological jargon, the majority of them are at a stage closer to pre-evangelisation. Evangelisation is the term given to spreading the gospel. To Irish ears it has dubious overtones, either of happy-clappy evangelicals or somewhat off-the-wall Catholics.
However, stripped of that prejudice and used in its technical sense, it is the core mission of any Christian church. Pope John Paul spoke frequently of a new evangelisation, of a fruitful engagement with culture that would allow the values of the gospels to illuminate everyday life. It means allowing space for deeper questions to surface, and respectfully presenting a perspective on life, death, human rights and dignity that is illuminated by the life, death and resurrection of the teacher from Nazareth.
What John Paul achieved with the majority of people was not quite evangelisation, but rather pre-evangelisation. In a world where ironic, cool detachment verging on cynicism was all that was on offer as a response to the stunning complexity and seeming meaninglessness of life, he was a living witness to a very different possibility.
In the early days his charisma, vitality and obvious affection for people, especially young people, meant that his hearers took a second look at the Christian values to which they might never have been exposed or else had rejected.
As he aged, he became more compelling. Western culture is dedicated to frantic denial of death, while John Paul showed that that seeming oxymoron, a good death, is possible. He allowed people to consider once again the question of faith, but that does not mean that many had come to firm conclusions, much less embraced the demands of being a faithful Catholic.
Alastair Campbell may have famously proclaimed, "We don't do God", but the kind of spin and worship of opinion polls he represents just adds to jaded cynicism. The reaction to John Paul II's death suggests respect and admiration for a man and an institution that did not tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.
Given the moral stature of the man, we are forced to ask uneasily whether, instead of being hopelessly out of touch, he was instead far ahead of the rest of us, that instead of being absurd and anachronistic, he was radical and countercultural?
Is freeing sexual expression from all constraint a liberation, or the route to nihilism? Is worship of the market the only option, or is it possible that globalised compassion and solidarity could be realised in a generation if we had the will? The current state of atheistic secularism that prevails in Europe is by no means an irreversible trend. Contrary to rumours, God is not dead.
As Diana showed us, wealth and status do not satisfy the often anguished needs of the human heart. John Paul has connected with the deepest desires of human beings. He has opened the door. The challenge for all churches, and not just Catholicism, is to demonstrate that "crossing the threshold of hope" is a possibility for everyone, and not just for heroic world figures who tower above their contemporaries.