I went on a pilgramage to see the Pope when he visited the UK in 1982. I was 11. Heaton Park near Manchester was the venue. It meant spending a freezing night camped in the open and then baking hours in the sun before the Pontiff’s arrival. It certainly was a day for wonders and visions. My mother collapsed with heat exhaustion just as the Pope arrived. I was dehydrated to the point that I hallucinated that the giant stage in the distance was the fireplace at home and I was in fact lying on my back on the living room carpet being lulled off to sleep by the sonorous tones of God’s man on Earth. Given that the best view of him we got was of a white dot on the horizon, I’m pretty sure my addled brain was telling me I’d have been better off at home watching the whole shebang on the telly.

It’s probably too soon after John Paul II’s death to expect much more than anodyne tributes and platitudes from the mainstream news coverage. More level-headed analysis will be conducted after the immediate mourning it seems.

It was also foolish to expect much from the great and the good. Bono, never one to miss an opportunity to make a fool of himself with a honking banality, described the Pope as “best front man” the Roman Catholic Church ever had. This after his description of Blair and Brown as the “Lennon and McCartney of global development“, pretty much makes Bono the Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards of analogy and metaphor.

The Prime Minister postponing the announcement of the election for 24 hours was a good one as well. Think of it less of a mark of respect and more of a recognition that the news cycle is out of New Labour’s control for the next 48 hours. Still, no harm done, and it should go down well with those Catholic voters still willing to forgive a Christian premier’s flexible interpretation of the sixth commandment.

My disenchantment with my Catholicism was in direct correlation with the awakening of my political principles. I remember an RE lesson when I was 15 and being told that babies that aren’t baptised before they die aren’t permitted into heaven. I remember being infuriated by the injustice and lack of logic. And it was downhill from there.

JPII was certainly a Pope to offend a then fledgling bleeding heart liberal and nascent athiest like me. He didn’t do much more to assauge me later on either. For the Catholic Church to condemn the use of condoms, and even to spread misinformation about their use, in an era of HIV/AIDS is desperately immoral. The debacle over the handling of paedophile priests destroyed any moral monopoly on homosexuality and a woman’s right to choose the Church could lay claim to. Pretty much any of the bete noires of the Church are fiercely guarded totems to us on the liberal left. Its cavalier handling of damaged children - coupled with a wider autocratic failure or unwillingness to grasp the realities of a late 20th century world - made damn sure the likes of me were never going to take lecture on morality from the Church ever again.

“Nothing more defines a man as his passing” has been a cliche overused in the last 24 hours. And yet, for all my liberal principles and militant athiestic thunder, I couldn’t but help but feel desperately sad for the Pope as he faded away - a vestige of my Catholicism or just a reaction of the morality many in the Church would deny we athiests possess? I know that’s not the way I want me or my family to go - spread out for the world to see, your most intimate ailments examined as if you were a dissected frog. Even I would have spared him that final indignity. For all the pain and suffering I believe his papacy brought to the world, I hoped his passing was eased with some soporific.

And he still had the final cosmic joke to come, a joke whose punchline none of us will ever see. A cruel joke perpetrated on believers to make them feel better about life being a struggle, sometimes brutal and painful. The Pope closed his eyes for the final time on this Earth, solid in his belief that, when he opened them again, he would be in the Kingdom of Heaven.

But he didn’t open them again, did he?