“We have a huge institutional church which in many ways is alienated from the real problems of the world and is involved in trying to preserve traditional theologies and traditional standpoints which seem irrelevant to human problems.”

—Father Shay Cullen

I can’t say there was a time during his life when I actually cared what Pope John Paul II was up to. I never really saw any link between me and some dude chilling in the midst of all the riches the Vatican, like so many other western European imperialist powers, had stolen from native cultures around the world.

I can’t say I ever spared a thought for what kept Karol Wojtyla awake at night.

Since his death, I guess I’ve also been moved to think about him. Not that I’ve been given much choice since everything else came to a standstill and all the international news networks became preoccupied with entrenching John Paul into modern mythology.

Now that he is gone and I’m here watching the faithful mourn him, I wonder what he would have thought of that vast outpouring of adulation.

I also wonder if he ever felt the focused waves of fire and damnation and judgment called on his head for upholding the legacy of decimation that is the Roman Catholic by my Rasta bredrin and sistren.

I mean, did he ever consider how strange it was for an old, white, celibate man in the First World to make decisions on the sexual and reproductive rights of a poverty-stricken young Andean woman with three children and a husband demanding she do her wifely duties?

Infallibility is neither here nor there with me, but I hope he finds rest after 26 years of service to a world of people who may or may not have appreciated the sacrifices he made.

A man. A man of flesh and blood and insecurities and inconsistencies. Who tried to live his life in the path of a king. In the footsteps of a man who probably never would have set foot near to the Vatican. Except maybe to throw a Molotov cocktail or two.

Because, as far as the Roman authorities 2000 years ago were concerned, this man called Jesus, son of Joseph, was a terrorist. A long-haired, sandal-wearing member of the lumpen. A rabble-rousing low-life of a carpenter.

So that 2000 years later, that the church built on the foundation of this man’s teachings could be in the name of the empire, the oppressor, well, it’s more than a little ironic.

But I know Jesus as well as I knew Pope John Paul. I have a sense of both that is a lot legend and little bit of the essence of the man. Distorted, changed, prettified and made acceptable to someone else’s notions of what this man should be.

How to make sense of a church that is so contrived? Trying to make sense of a man who at once stood against poverty, but sought to snuff out the work of priest/revolutionaries like Paulo Friere, who dared to take Christianity back to what I have a feeling the man called Christ first envisioned it to be through their liberation theology, embracing the work of Mother Teresa but still standing firm against women priests.

It doesn’t make sense to me but maybe in matters of religion sense doesn’t necessarily come into consideration.

Where next for the church is the question. Where next, indeed, in a time in western Europe when the faithful have lost faith and those who stay flout all the dogma without batting an eye.

Will they take some kind of affirmative action and dare elect a black Pope, seeing that it’s only in the countries of the south that the church’s numbers have stayed constant? Or will they see John Paul’s passing as the end of an era of conservatism and a time to change old ways in an effort to re-embrace the many that have turned away in search of something that is more real and less bound up in arcane ritual and no-longer-relevant traditions.

Not a dry eye on the streets surrounding St Peter’s Basilica and, in some scenes, devoted pilgrims become ungodly seething mobs, breaking through barriers to get a last glimpse of their pope.

And I wonder if they shed tears for the loss of a spiritual leader? Or do they shed tears for their own folly at needing someone else to tell them the difference between right and wrong.

Ah we humans. Always searching for someone to look up to. Always denying our own god-like state, always somehow missing the point of our being all God’s children. As if the same god of whom the pope is an elected representative wouldn’t bestow that gift on all his children.