A Tribute to a Great Man

I admit I tried to do this myself - but fell flat on my face in my attempts. Trying to write an obituary of such an extraordinary person is no simple task. But today on the momentous solemnity of his requiem - billed as possibly the greatest funeral man has ever seen I enclose the words from Richard Owen - a correspondent who has covered the pope for more than 10 years - speaking of indefatigable energy, enormous charisma and a fountain of holiness, all from one person.

A handshake, a blessing, an amazing man


WHEN THE news broke this week that the funeral of John Paul II was to be held tomorrow, I asked a Vatican official if the Holy See was aware that this would clash with the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles. “Wedding?” he said. “What wedding?”

The papacy is the last absolute monarchy on Earth: nothing else approaches it in its theatrical displays of authority, and once you are inside the Vatican all else fades into insignificance. The Vatican deals in eternal verities, and thinks in centuries. Nothing compares to the death of the “Pope of Popes”.

Covering John Paul II’s life and times over the past ten years has been like reporting at the court of a great potentate or medieval emperor. It is not just the acres of marble, priceless works of art, colourfully clad Swiss Guard, and vaulted ceilings: at the heart of the world’s smallest sovereign state is a man who becomes almost God-like. You found yourself referring to him, along with everyone else, as the Holy Father.

Yet Karol Wojtyla remained a man, behind the pomp and magic, and those who saw him at close quarters will always remember the human being, not the icon: that sharp, quizzical look from beneath his eyebrows, as if he could penetrate our very souls, that wry sense of humour, the iron will, the flashes of anger at injustice, suffering, waste of life, and war.

It is the same human warmth that made him such a breaker of taboos, impatient with protocol, and which made him so loved by people who never even met him, except through the power of television. As I write, millions of people are pouring into Rome, completely blocking the medieval streets around the Vatican where The Times flat is situated. So powerful was his presence, in fact, that it is hard to think of him as dead at all.

That waxen figure, dressed up in great crimson robes, a white mitre, and — an oddly poignant touch this — shoes instead of the traditional papal slippers, cannot be him. As we filed past his body, even the most cynical Vatican reporters were close to tears, or even in tears, remembering the emotional intensity of travelling with him and reporting his impact on far-flung places.

The death of John Paul II had been so long awaited, and his decline so drawn out, that we had almost come to think he was immortal. After the initial shock of his death last Saturday, we comforted ourselves with the joke that he was only pretending, and would shortly appear as usual at his window high above St Peter’s Square.

The conceit that the Pope is superhuman is the result of centuries of Vatican mystery and secrecy.

Under Joaquin Navarro-Valls, John Paul II’s spokesman, the Vatican press operation has been tightly controlled. Dr Navarro-Valls is Spanish, a former doctor turned journalist turned spokesman who was at the Pope’s side for 20 years and whose every word was scrutinised — by us — for clues as to what is really going on behind the high Vatican walls.

When the commander of the Swiss Guard was found dead in his Vatican flat in 1998, together with his wife and a young Swiss Guards corporal, “Navarro” had solved the mystery within 24 hours: the corporal had nursed a grievance at being passed over for promotion, and had committed the murders before shooting himself through the mouth after leaving a suicide note.

Oddities in the note which suggested that it was a forgery, or the fact that the hole in the corporal’s head was made by a bullet of different calibre from those found in the flat — all was quickly dismissed. The Vatican had spoken. Such certainty — or arrogance — is a reflection not only of the Vatican’s culture of secrecy, embedded since Renaissance times and the Borgias, but also of doctrinal absolutism.

In the Vatican the written text, like Scripture itself, is all: if a papal text is released, and the Pope then omits certain passages, he is deemed to have delivered them anyway. On a papal trip, journalists are issued with a printed programme with their name on it, with every event timed to the second. Papal speeches are issued at specified times, often at dawn, for no apparent reason apart from masochism. If the specified time is between, say, 5.30am and 5.40am, and you turn up (bleary eyed) at 5.41am you are told that you are too late.

The Pope’s genius was that he burst the bounds of this tight control.

He was a consummate actor who weighed the impact of his every move and gesture and knew how to exploit the media, whether walking in the snows of the Abruzzo mountains, leaning on his crozier in a dramatic pose, or, latterly, offering a wordless blessing from his window, struggling to speak.
In his youth he used his vigour to capture the world’s imagination and spread the faith: in old age, he used his obvious suffering.

I shall never forget him wagging his finger at the crowds on St Peter’s Square in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, passionately recalling his experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland and declaring, in that distinctive Polish-accented Italian of his, “mai piu’ guerra” — “no more war”. On papal trips, even as his physical strength declined, it was an effort to keep up with him.

In the Holy Land in 2000 it was the press corps which was exhausted, not the “ailing Pope”, as we went with him to Jordan, the Palestinian occupied territories — including Bethlehem, where he knelt at Jesus’s birthplace — and Jerusalem, where we watched him place a trembling hand on the Wailing Wall, well aware of the power of the image as it flashed around the world.

On Lake Galilee, where thousands assembled on a hillside where the multitudes once heard Christ, we watched his helicopter appear from the sky as the sun burst from the clouds in an almost Biblical miracle. The same year I went with him to Fatima in Portugal, where in 1917 the Virgin Mary had appeared to three Portuguese children and revealed to them the coming horrors of the 20th century in three “secrets”: at Fatima he told us that the “Third Secret ” had predicted the attempt on his own life in 1981, as a “bishop in white” spattered in blood.

In 2002, in his native Poland — freed, with his help, from communism — I saw the roots of the deep faith (and nationalism) on which he drew and heard him describe his long road from the “Polish boy in clogs” to the successor of St Peter. In Azerbaijan the same year he reached out to the Muslims, and in Bulgaria on the same whirlwind trip he absolved Sofia of involvement in the 1981 murder attempt, carried out by a Turkish gunman on the orders of Moscow, terrified — rightly — of the impact of a Polish Pope on the morally bankrupt communist system.

It was on the way back from Sofia that we were summoned to his cabin, and I talked to him about his historic visit to Britain in 1982, the year after the assassination attempt. Despite some initial hostility — not to mention the Falkands conflict — he had been greeted like a rock star, I reminded him. He talked about the importance of keeping up the ecumenical dialogue. “Beautiful and historic country, Great Britain, ” he said, with a smile, and that sharp look. “I wish you all well.”

The next year, in Slovakia — another post-communist East European country — we were at his side as he failed for the first time to deliver his opening address, and the lurch in our stomachs told us that this was the beginning of the end. Yet he retained to the last what can only be described as his charisma, that indefinable quality which signals that you are in the presence of an extraordinary human being. Whenever I saw him in the presence of successive Archbishops of Canterbury on their visits to Rome, the Reformation appeared a mere blip in history — as arguably it does now, as the Prince of Wales and Dr Rowan Williams both make their pilgrimage to pay homage to him.

If I have one regret, it is that I never travelled with him in the first half of his pontificate, when he regularly left his cabin to come back and talk to Vatican reporters.

Looking back through my archives, I find that in early 1996, not long after my arrival, I was speculating about his demise, and tipping as his successor Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, 69 at the time, and Archbishop of Milan.

The headline was “Church makes papal health taboo as frail pontiff contemplates foreign ventures and the year 2000”.

He duly saw in the year 2000, wearing an astonishing celebratory “coat of many colours”, and Cardinal Martini is now long retired and himself in poor health. The joke, in the end, was on all of us who prematurely predicted the end of John Paul II. His legacy remains controversial, and historians will long debate whether his role in ending the East-West conflict and reconciling the world’s great faiths must be balanced against his record on Aids and contraception, the role of women, abortion, divorce and homosexuality.

But he was a rock of stability and reassurance in an unstable world, a charismatic source of moral authority, and that is why the world is now mourning him. I still cannot quite believe that his familiar voice will no longer echo across St Peter’s Square and through the windows of my office. He was an amazing man and, along with many millions of others, I miss him deeply.