Okay. It's not like I knew him personally. Actually, I'm doing something pretty Quakerly there, calling the late Pope John Paul II by his given name. But that was his name, and for most of his life that's who he was.

Still, I'm probably as saddened as any active Catholic by his passing away. I always admired him, and I came to admire him more even after I left Catholicism and as he grew older and more infirm.

I was in the 7th grade when he was installed. He was installed on my birthday, in fact, in 1978. People were excited about him. Conservatives were excited because he was, of course, conservative. You don't get left wing popes - it just doesn't happen.....

People in the United States and in other industrialized nations who wonder "why the pope doesn't drag the church into modern times" forget that the Pope is the leader of all Catholics, not just educated ones in free societies with lots of choices. For faithful people in poverty "right to life" issues tend to mean that it's safe for them to go to the hospital without fearing that some corporation is going to turn off the ventilator 2 seconds after they close their eyes to keep costs down. ( and if you think that's not a real concern, you haven't been paying attention to what happened in Texas under the current leader of American Style "Conservatism")

Progressives were excited because he wasn't Italian. And his elevation was the first time that had happened in over 400 years. It was kind of like the excitement you'd get in an election here when somebody really unexpected wins...like Jimmy Carter, or Jesse Ventura....the common people saying "hey, maybe this guy is someone who has another point of view besides that of an insider."

There was all kinds of wild speculation about what might be next: women priests? married priests? a reversal of the church's position on birth control? Good Pope John DID bring Catholics - mostly kicking and screaming as far as I could see - into the 20th century with Vatican II and the end of the Latin mass. What was gonna be The Next Big Thing?

Wisely, not much. He didn't focus on sweeping reform in a body of believers still largely rocked and shocked by the last sweeping reform. I was among the last of American Catholics to receive communion in the 2nd grade and be confirmed in the 8th grade. Mine was the first class in our Catholic school to be introduced to confession as the the "Rite of Reconcilliation" which took place face to face....and let me tell you, during the years that I was a practicing Catholic I hopped back in that dark box as soon as I could reliabley find one. I lined up with the little old ladies wearing doilies on their heads while my classmates went in to chat with Fr. Hooper. Forget that! I was constitutionally unsuited to admiting to the dude I had just seen 10 minutes ago on the basketball court that I lied to my parents 5 times, cussed 187 times ( i had a terrible mouth as a young person. Ask my brother!), and was still stuffing my peas my skirt pocket and getting rid of them in the bathroom later. It was a lot easier to imagine the priest-as-conduit-to-Christ if I didn't have a mental picture of him having accidentally been goosed by an 8th grader during the aforementioned ball game.

Instead he focused on outreach. Travel. Building bridges with people of other faiths. Forgiveness. He was indeed conservative....but unlike some liberal Christians, to me "conservative" is not a dirty word. It's a word describing somebody with a different point of view from mine, and conservatism in such a huge church can have value. Okay, taking 500 years to admit that Galileo was right was a little excessive, but what I'm saying here is that there's more to leadership than policy.

So he talked the talk but he also walked the walk. I'm willing to listen to someone speak out against stem cell research when that individual is suffering so badly with Parkinson's disease he can hardly stand up: that guy had the moral weight to speak on that subject. He did a lot of things he didn't have to do. He could have just forgiven the guy who tried to kill him. He didn't have to go see him personally and sit in the guy's jail cell with him. He could have invited people all over the world to come see him, especailly after he was slowing down. They'd have understood. They'd have come. Instead he kept going all over the world to see them, to speak to them in their own language, to say mass on their own soil.

They're calling him "The People's Pope" now, and I think that's about right. I don't think you have to be Catholic to be sad to see him go - to recognise that he was a light of kindness in a world of cruelty.