A saint and saviour for the masses

ROME - The cult starts here. You wouldn't notice unless you looked hard.

It has its origins on the back of a visiting card tucked in among candles and photographs of the late Pope at a makeshift shrine in the middle of St Peter's Square.

In Spanish it says: "Saint John Paul II, intercede for the health of your son".

The late Pope created more saints than all of his modern predecessors put together, some of them - such as Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei - in double-quick time.

But in his 26-year papacy, even he never created a saint overnight.

Yet so intense is the sense of loss, so powerful the cult of personality surrounding the late John Paul II, that this - in effect - is what is happening here now.

From suffering vicar of Christ - his own slow and agonising death re-enacting the Calvary of Jesus, as many devout people here saw it - he has leaped with one bound into the ranks of the saints.

The business card with the pregnant message was among dozens of prayers and love letters, photographs, children's paintings, painted hearts, bunches of flowers and many, many candles round an ornate iron lampstand in the piazza.

Katja Raithel, 29, a German tourist, said she remembered being made to stay silent by her mother as they listened to the Pope's Easter Mass on a crackling radio.

"We will surely have affection for the next one, but this Pope will stay in our hearts," she said.

More votive offerings arrive with every passing moment.

People turn up, deftly add their own candle, message or photograph to the mounting, teetering pile, then step back and kneel in thoughtful prayer, or turn as if abashed and quickly walk away.

A small crowd hovers round the shrine, a still point within the large, endlessly shifting crowd in the square. They peer, sniff the flowers, squint to read the messages, lingering as if here - if nowhere else - they can still be close to him.

It is as if, in the minds of many of the devout, the suffering of John Paul II and the suffering of Jesus have become one and the same.

The most common photograph to be tucked in among the others here is of Michelangelo's marble masterpiece inside St Peter's Basilica, a few hundred metres from here, of the Virgin Mary holding the lifeless body of her son in her arms. 

"Papa" - Italian for Pope - reads one message, "you have suffered much for our sins. We pray to you. We wish you to rest in peace."

It's as if faith in Jesus and God, in these secular times, is a challenge too far - while faith in that amazing old man who only last week gasped for breath and strove to speak at the window in the Apostolic Palace high above this square, comes easy.

Nobody really knew him, apart from a small, tight-knit group of intimates, mostly Polish priests, nuns and professors.

Yet millions felt they knew him well, so powerful was his charisma.

And that intense but somewhat unreal emotion - like the fake sense of intimacy we enjoy with secular celebrities and royalty - survives his death unscathed.

"He made the church more human, closer to the real people," says Giorgio Arduini, who came to pay his respects on behalf of his wheelchair-bound wife. He is not a practising Catholic but still "felt deeply" the Pope's suffering.

Yet Karol Wojtyla is gone now, physically, and the difference that makes in the mood of this beautiful Renaissance piazza is immense.

While he lingered up there in his bedroom, slipping in and out of consciousness, his body temperature and blood pressure bouncing up and down, his breath growing shallow, there was no other possible focus for the attention of pilgrims than his suffering.

In the piazza, everyone reflexively turned in the direction of that window, or kneeled or sat or stood in groups singing hymns facing it.

The silence on Thursday and Friday evenings was unreal: so many thousands here, of every age and condition and many nationalities, occupying the square without special ceremony or formality, but so quietly that the loudest sound was the splashing of the ornate fountains.

Then he died, the announcement came over the loudspeakers, and the silence was total. It was broken by a round of applause. Let's hear it for the grand old gentleman.

And it was at that moment that the tension was broken. He had been released. His sufferings were at an end - and ours, too, on his behalf.

There were tears for his loss, of course - rivers of them. But within minutes of the Pope's death, people were able to talk of joy, too.

"I feel sad because he's gone," said a woman walking through the crowd with her husband and baby, "but I feel joy, as well, because he has been liberated from his suffering."

Yesterday, the piazza was a different place completely.

The Pope had been liberated and Rome had been liberated, too. The Pope's corpse might be lying in state in the Sala Clementina inside the Apostolic Palace - this morning it was to move to the Basilica, where the public can pay their last respects - but the living focus was gone.

That room was just a room again, that window just a window.

Families traipsed along the traffic-free Via della Conciliazione eating icecreams, pushing buggies, walking their dogs.

In the corner of the square closest to the palace where he had died, a lively chorus sang modern hymns, some loud and exuberant, with drum and tambourine, and clapping.

"Giovanni Paolo!" they chanted, as if on the football terraces. "Giovanni Paolo, [clap clap clap], Giovanni Paolo!"

"Alleluia!" they sang. There was no longer any call to be quiet.

You couldn't help but be sad.

- INDEPENDENT