THE FUNERAL of Pope Paul II in Rome on Friday has been described in wire dispatches as one of the largest the world has ever seen. Millions around the world watched, by way of television, the tens of thousands crammed into St. Peter's Square, mixing prayer with the solemn salutations of pilgrims crying for the Roman Catholic Church to declare the dead pontiff a saint, along with a ritual change in name to John Paul the Great.
The colourful assemblage of "President, prime ministers and kings" as the Associated Press described it, also joined a remarkable ecumenical mix of religious faiths mingled for the occasion with the prelates who shepherd more than a billion Roman Catholics around the world.
Some observers have made the point that this outpouring is a monumental tribute to a giant of the 20th century who ruled from the Vatican, a tiny nation-state without army or the secular paraphernalia of the great nations of the world. All the more reason to hail this towering church leader wielding only the spiritual force of moral authority through the tenets of a faith anchored in 2000 years of Christian tradition.
It is a remarkable testament to the power of religious faith that this funeral prompted even the temporary abandonment of temporal enmities. For Muslim and Jew, and the assembled titans of political realms, showed that their nations had been moved by the more than two decades of pilgrimage John Paul had undertaken around the world.
He visited Castro's Cuba as well as our own country in a deliberate mission to vault the barriers of politics and ideology. Pope John Paul II is credited with having played a decisive role in the collapse of the communist Soviet Union in tandem with the process of helping to foment the Solidarity movement in his native Poland. That, in turn, changed the nature of international relations and gave rise to America's status as sole superpower.
This is already a famous example of the relevance of moral force in the most secular of national concerns. On a much smaller scale, it is the kind of strategy that has motivated here at home, in our crises of crime and violence, the move by government leaders to seek the help of the Church.
The papal funeral was a remarkable tableau of the confluence of the secular and the spiritual.
At the peak of a great religious denomination, the Vatican state has helped to move the world in the life a pope who has sealed his place in the history of the world.
