A loaves and fishes thing

The very early Wednesday morning bin collections on Abbey Street in Ennis prior to October 1979 would, likely as not, wake you up. There was much clattering of bin lids and much chatter among the bin collection men. After October 1979, there was an added dimension to the noise. As they journeyed around the small streets of the market town, one of the young men would place himself in the centre of each street and shout loudly "Yang people of Ireland, I loff you".

There was the crescendo effect as they came over the Club Bridge. His shout on Abbey Street would send you under the pillow and, even 20 minutes later, as they hit the top of O'Connell Street, you could still hear it.

While it raised an initial smile, as the weeks went on and the cry still echoed, it evoked increasing discomfort, not just because of disturbed sleep. Repeated by someone possibly clinging to the last rung of the ladder before falling into the emigration drain, the phrase evolved into biting social commentary.

The passing of Pope John Paul II, who uttered the cry during the youth mass held in Galway, seems to have peeled off a couple of layers of the hard shell which encases us and left us, maybe just momentarily, more thoughtful, more vulnerable, more connected.

Switching on the television on Friday evening, it was initially difficult to face what might have been hours or even days waiting for the Pope to die. And yet, as the cameras picked out the faces and lingered on them, as the wide shots took in St Peter's Square and the grandeur of the buildings, the little groups huddled around candles, the night sky – it gradually became harder to switch it off, or switch channels or walk away.

The people in St Peter's Square were so beautiful. How often do we get to see camera shots of people's faces in moments of quiet reflection or prayer? These days it is only catastrophe or sports which merit the lingering camera shots, the acres of newsprint.

Of course, the media coverage of the event had its awkward and hilarious moments. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's small boy disappointment when the journalists (hardly any of them Catholic I'll bet) had so few questions to ask him during his press conference at Westminster Cathedral on Sunday; Donnacha O'Dulaing referring to Paul Marcinkus as "a gobdaw" when recounting the latter's heavy handed dealings with the press on the airplane as the Pope was arriving in Ireland; even Angela Rippon's earnest attempt to take us through the line-ups of possible next Popes, assuring us at the end that it might be one of them, or it might be someone "completely different".

I have a memory too of the television coverage in Israel of the Pope's visit to Yad Vashem in 2000. The Israelis, like so many others who met the Pope in his declining years, were propelled into extending him a helping hand as he slowly made his way.

Ehud Barak, the then Prime Minister, was heard to gently tell him "I come from Poland too" and in that moment, it was not about the momentous statement which the Pope was about to make calling for an end to the enmity between Christians and Jews, and not about Barak's grandparents who died in the Holocaust, but something far more profound – the establishing of common ground.

And while these days we sometimes seem to have very little in common; when the teachings of Islam are equated with the worst fanaticism and the moral teachings of all religions are seen as unnecessary shackles, the common ground that love created last weekend was expanding before our eyes, even as the mighty proportions of St Peter's Square seemed to be able to hold all that would come. A loaves and fishes thing.

On a personal level, I owe the Pope. My late aunt, a nun from Rhode Island, was choosing between a trip to Rome on her sabbatical year and a trip to Israel where I lived. She chose the latter because, as she told me "the Holy Father said we must reach out to all religions".

Forbidden to enter a Protestant church for a service in her childhood years, she came with us on those memorable hot August days from the Bahá'í Shrines, to the Mountain of the Beatitudes overlooking the still perfect peace that surrounds Galilee; from the welcome shade of the olive trees at Gethsemane to the dazzling brightness of the Western Wall where she placed her petitions.

Battling sciatica, she strode with her walking stick into the middle of the Dome of the Rock and, face beaming asked "How could anyone think that this place was not for the glory of God"?

As we witnessed the world grieving for the late Pope this past week, I was reminded again and again of something Brendan O'Regan, known down our way as the "Father of Shannon", said to me during an interview two years ago. Now well into his 80s and still with that same phenomenal optimism about life and its possibilities, he kept saying "We must be good. We must be good".

And as the applause filled St Peter's Square when the announcement of the Pope's passing was made and as so much of the world responded with great respect to the winging of the soul of the man who was the sign of Christ on earth for Catholics and, for many, simply someone possessed with ultimate in world credibility, we have rarely, in recent years, shown so openly that, given half a chance, we would very much like to be good.