Angels lead Pope John Paul II into paradise

There was a dignity about the final hours. 'Conscious, lucid and serene', the Vatican said. The last rites were administered on Thursday night. He asked for mass to be said in his bedroom on Friday morning, then a reading of the Stations of the Cross and of the priest's office: John Paul II preparing for his own passing, awaiting 'The angels to lead him into paradise'. By Vincent Browne

The last public glimpses of his struggling for words and breath at his apartment window on Easter Sunday and again on the following Wednesday showed him in distress. Perhaps the advanced technical sophistication of the Vatican had intruded too far into his final days. That advanced sophistication evident in those last weeks with a camera in his pope mobile as he was been driven from hospital, the camera in his apartment showing him following the holy week ceremonies, and the announcement on Friday that further communications on his evolving health situation would be relayed to the world electronically.

This papacy will be remembered by Catholics for hundreds of years not just because of its extraordinary longevity – 27 years – but because of the role this Pope played in the collapse of eastern European communism and the revival he gave to the power, influence and charisma of the office.

His single minded determination to confront the communist regime in Poland in the first decade of his papacy was a significant factor in unsettling the foundation of not just the Polish communist regime but the soviet one as well. He rejected the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI who had sought an accommodation with communism and he rejected the urgings of Vatican and Polish clerics who pressed him to compromise.

As Pope he concentrated power in his own hands more than any Pope had done since Pious IX, the Pope who declared himself and his successors infallible on matters of faith and morals. Pope John Paul II centralised the appointment of bishops in a way never done previously, thereby creating a higher clergy very much in his own image.

There have been other "firsts" with this papacy. He created more saints than were created over the previous 400 years and in doing so coloured the nature of Catholicism very much in tune with his own ideology, deeply conservative and authoritarian. While he beatified Pope John XXIII, he did so while also beatifying Pious IX. His two most controversial beatifications were those of the Opus Dei founder Monsignor Escriva and Padre Pio. The formal rigid procedures for the appointment of saints were relaxed to permit a fast track process for his favourite icons. While protesting his conformity with the spirit and letter of Vatican II, he in fact reversed much of what had been achieved then. For instance he was openly scornful of the idea of collegiality as represented by the Synod of Bishops.

It is difficult for Catholics to perceive, during these days of intense focus on the papacy, how historically brittle are the claims of the papacy. Only the gospel of Matthew has Jesus saying "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church". Certainly St Paul did not believe Peter had any special authority as he revealed in his famous letter to the Galatians where he recounts how he challenged Peter and, by inference, called him a hypocrite on the issue of admitting gentiles into the church.

It was only 200 years after Christ that the Bishop of Rome fastened on the Matthew credentials and it was a few centuries later still that the pope was regarded by Christendom as the supreme authority. The Bishop of Rome owes his position more to the charisma of the Roman Empire than any divine conferring.

The next few weeks will be filled with speculation on the new pope, someone now unknown outside his own sphere but soon to become one of the most famous leaders in the world.

We are about to witness the sacred dramas of this extraordinary institution – the burial of one pope and the election of another. While empires, kingdoms, sheikdoms and Reichs have melted away into historical oblivion over the last 2000 years, only the papacy has survived. John Paul II may have ensured its survival for thousands more.