Being here is the only way I can say thank you

Rome is full of people like me - Catholics who have made their way here for the Pope's obsequies, not knowing quite why they are here, only that it matters that we should be here. Of course, I know that I could have seen his body far better on television than I did in St Peter's, and there's no doubt that anyone watching the funeral in London will see far more of what's going on than most of us in Rome.

It's still important that I should be here, because it's the last chance I or anyone else shall have to pay my respects to John Paul II. To do that, you pay outrageous sums for your fare, beg space on someone's floor for somewhere to stay, change your plans for the week, drive up your overdraft, just to be able to say that you were there when one of the great popes was laid to rest.

In a way, in saying goodbye to the Pope, I am saying goodbye to part of my own past. He was made Pope when I was a teenager, and ever since, I have been conscious of his travels, his pronouncements, his illness, his theatricality, his attempts to engage with the post-communist world, and his sometimes ponderous philosophy.

He was a large figure in a world where there are few great men, and it was impossible to ignore him whether you agreed with his world view or not. I did, mostly, but for all that, I used to mock his heavy accent, his moral seriousness, even, God forgive me, the tremulousness that came from his Parkinson's disease.

Even so, I had never been in any doubt that this man was something substantial in an age of moral vacuity. He had, moreover, visited two of the countries in which I lived, Ireland and England. Perhaps this is my way of returning the compliment.

More than that: physically to come to Rome when he is laid to rest is the only way I have of showing gratitude for the life he put at the service of the Christian community. The streets of Rome just now have posters of the Pope with the simple word, grazie, thank you. That's why I'm here, I suppose, to say thank you, even if I'm lost among the four million other souls who are here for the same purpose.

Catholics' title for the Pontiff is the Holy Father, and there's a way in which that isn't just a form of words. I felt curiously bereft when he died, as though a large presence had been removed from my world, a kindly figure, not a remote and forbidding one.

He was rather a vulnerable figure, in the way he tried so terribly hard to engage with the world around him - the young, women, other faiths, unbelievers, the sick, you name it. It was impossible not to respond to that attempt to

connect. In coming to Rome, too, as a Catholic you inevitably feel part of a bigger whole - the extraordinary, flawed, diverse community of sinners and saints (chiefly sinners) that is the Catholic Church.

LIKE hundreds of thousands of other pilgrims, I stood for hours in the biggest queue Rome has ever seen, to view the Pope's body as it lay in state. Around me there was a remarkable cross-section of the Church. There were the Filipina nuns, the Italian old ladies with brollies to keep off the sun, the fat Americans, the Milanese soldiers in feathered hats, the snogging young couples from God knows where, the ubiquitous, impoverished blonde Poles, the chatty Brazilians, the dignified young African sisters, the young Englishmen in tweeds, the fathers with little girls on their shoulders.

Few of them seemed to be praying and most seemed rather cheerful. We had nothing in common, and yet we had in common all that matters: a Christian faith and a sense of loss that the man who lay dead within the Basilica was gone. It's at times like this that differences of class and language don't really matter.

There are obvious comparisons with the huge queue of people who lined up in Kensington to pay homage to

Princess Diana after her death. That gathering too was rather dignified and sombre and diverse.

But apart from the fact that this crowd was far bigger and didn't have a rose wrapped in cellophane among them, there was something radically different too. The Princess didn't leave a discernible legacy behind, apart from a memory of vivacity and beauty, but the Pope does. He made a change in the way people think about things, the way I think about things, which will long survive him.

The Papacy too is different after his reign, radically different. It can't ever be as remote again. As it happened, I found actually witnessing the body of the Pope a curious anti-climax. The body looked like it did on television, only more wax-like. The ushers who were trying to keep the pilgrims moving on, to make room for others, made contemplation or prayer impossible. Just being in that enormous gathering - not that it was particularly prayerful or solemn - was the most moving part of this pilgrimage and the bit I won't forget.

Sometimes the only tribute you can pay a man is to be at his

funeral. In Ireland, where I grew up, going to funerals was a fundamental part of social life, and visiting the corpse was something you took for granted.

One of the Pope's last great acts was to die in public, exposing his frailty and physical impotence to the merciless scrutiny of critical observers. It was the ultimate rebuke to the way most of us now treat the dying. Now he's dead, we can appreciate the dogged courage he showed in doing so.

Being here today is the one way I can say thank you, for that, and so much else.