Rite and Reason: In St Peter's Square this evening Pope Benedict will preside at a Mass marking the first anniversary of the death of John Paul II. Patsy McGarry remembers the momentous events of this time last year
Almost 9pm and the Mass in Dublin had just ended. It was held to honour the memory of Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in San Salvador 25 years previously, while saying Mass. He was assassinated by state security forces because of his outspokenness against the persecution and oppression of the poor of his benighted country, El Salvador.
In Dublin the congregation at the Franciscan Church on Merchants' Quay that April Saturday evening last year was small and made up mainly of people from the Catholic relief agency, Trócaire.
At its end everyone stood for the final blessing when someone approached the Mass celebrant, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, on the altar and whispered to him.
Dr Martin paused, turned to the congregation and said, with a slight trip in his voice, "it has just been confirmed that Pope John Paul has died".
Someone uttered an involuntary "Jesus!" Pope John Paul had been ailing for weeks but the finality of the moment was still a shock.
Speaking to The Irish Times after the Mass, Archbishop Martin remembered the deceased Pope in a flurry of recollection, coloured by admiration and affection. It was hardly surprising. He had spent almost 30 years in Rome, most of it during Pope John Paul's papacy, with whom he had regular personal contact.
In fact he had helped with the preparation of the Pope's influential encyclical on Catholic social teaching, Centesimus Annus (1991). Before becoming Archbishop of Dublin he had served as the Vatican's permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, but previously and for well over two and a half decades he held various positions at the Vatican with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
It was also he who, famously, introduced the U2 front man to Pope John Paul with the words "Holy Father, this is Mr Bono", and it was through his intercession that Ireland's soccer players became the only international team to have an audience with Pope John Paul during the Italia 90 World Cup.
That evening last year in Adam and Eve's, the archbishop remembered the holiness and stubbornness of a great old man and how, for example, during preparations for the Great Jubilee Year of 2000 he called Cardinal Roger Etcheguray to see him in hospital to secure support for his own plans for that special year.
The French cardinal was head of the Vatican committee with responsibility for organising the jubilee celebrations. Pope John Paul wanted to use the occasion to apologise for the sins of the church in the past, but a powerful lobby of cardinals in Rome had other ideas.
They wanted to use the occasion to celebrate the papacy's triumphal survival for 2,000 years.
From his hospital bed Pope John Paul, with Cardinal Etcheguray, organised the successful outflanking of those cardinals which saw jubilee 2000 used for the more humble purpose he espoused.
In the days following his death Rome was deluged with millions of mourners, many of them Polish. Some queued for up to 13 hours to see his remains in St Peter's Basilica.
Included were a young Polish couple Agnieszka Nonaczk (24) and her fiancée Jakub Stadnik (28), with Jakub's 18-year-old brother Karol, named after the Pope. They were from Wielkopolska, near Poznan in western Poland.
Over those nights they slept in blankets laid on cobblestones in a street near St Peter's. It took them 36 hours non-stop travel by coach to reach Rome. Agnieszka and Jakub had planned to marry last August and then go to Rome to get Pope John Paul's blessing.
All that changed with his death so they came to Rome to pray before his remains, which they did, hoping to secure his blessing in that way.
On the eve of Pope John Paul's funeral, chatting in a street near St Peter's after he had seen the remains, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern spoke of the "great honour" of being there.
The papal nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Lazarotto, had arranged, through friends, to get him "very close" to the body where he had prayed, the Taoiseach said.
The funeral itself was an extraordinary spectacle. Over 200 heads of state and prime ministers attended, including three US presidents. It was unprecedented. In addition there were many representatives of the Christian denominations, other world faiths, as well as the hundreds of thousands in St Peter's Square itself and in Rome's surrounding streets.
Two memorable images stand out from the funeral Mass - a gust of wind blowing shut the opened Gospel on Pope John Paul's coffin, and the final salute before that coffin entered St Peter's. There, the 12 pall bearers turned and dipped the coffin front, to momentous applause.
It was a powerful moment - a final public act in the life and death of one of the great men of our times.
Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times