Agony of life, ecstasy of death

When death came, it created a hush in the expecting heart of millions fully aware it had been imminent. The hush preceded the flood of fresh weeping, the massive regret that a great and good man was no more. Yet, there was ecstasy too in that knowledge.

In the preciousness of having shared, and benefited from, over 26 years of heightened awareness of faith, of love, of the being of one who has already been variously and splendidly described, perhaps no more so than as "an extraordinary Pope".

That ecstasy will last far beyond the tributes that began pouring in well before the Vatican camerlengo, Cardinal Eduardo Martinez Samalo, who will run the Vatican until a new Pope is chosen, called three times the baptismal name of John Paul II, with a silver hammer struck his forehead, also three times, to ensure he was dead, and with it too destroyed the papal ring, the symbol of the Pope's authority.

The memory of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, will prevail through the centuries. A memory of how he captivated millions, including non-Catholics, and non-believers too, by the sheer force of his personality and charisma, of how - while he was essentially a theologically intransigent traditionalist - he reshaped the Church with what has been termed a heroic vision of a combative, disciplined Catholicism.

And also, of the political dynamic that evolved out of his very being and stoked up the spirit of freedom that swept in revolutionary changes in his native Poland and in the rest of erstwhile Communist central Europe, though not so much elsewhere. Some have cried out, heartbroken, that he was irreplaceable.

Life's surprises and, surely, the hand of Providence never tire out. Pope John XXIII burst on the scene like the warmest of suns and lit the world with constant light. It seemed no successor could be so engaging, so magnetic and able to arouse feelings of goodness and serenity.

Yet, Papa Luciani, Pope John Paul I, stepped into the shoes of that gigantic fisherman as if they had been ordered for him and immediately transmitted a sense of all-embracing joy, a promise that he would be a great, probably reformist Pope.

Mysterious death struck him down within weeks, leaving no chance for that promise to bloom, to the consternation and bewilderment of the Catholic world, already captivated by Papa Luciani. And still, seemingly out of nowhere, came Karol the Pole, the beginning of a saga that ended on Saturday night.

The new Pope will have a tremendously hard act to follow. Above all, he will have challenges that remain and indeed have grown in his predecessor's last years.

Challenges within the Catholic world, the role of the Church in such a rapidly changing society, in China, in Africa, in huge areas of contradiction in Latin America and Asia where social justice is a myth and the poor have indeed remained for always, despite the relative strength of the Church.

Also, the new Pope will have to address the perception, emphasised in the last weeks and days of the great Papa Karol, now awaiting burial, of an overly strong Vatican. John Paul II was a remarkably mentally strong man whose spirit was indomitable even if his body was assailed and ravaged by illness.

A spokesperson could not have put it more aptly, some time ago, as "a soul pulling a body". Nevertheless, late decisions affecting the structure of the Church, such as the last-gasp appointment of 17 bishops, were odd.

As were the almost angry denials by the Vatican that the Pope had gone into a coma, the persistent insistence regarding his continuing lucidity, almost an effort to project indestructibility.

Lingering life became an agony to endure as television stations and Vatican statements followed and transmitted every failing breath. Some said all that was a symbol of strength, of dignity in final old age. If it was much of that, if even children were inspired by "the great fight", I found it terrible that private death was turned into such a media event.

When death finally came, there was, in addition to the ecstasy of sharing in and forever remembering greatness, an unconscious ecstatic relief that the agony of living the end was over. That Karol Wojtyla had finally gone to meet the Lord he had so faithfully served.