"John Paul the Straight"?

Perhaps the oddest comment of the past few weeks with regards to the death of John Paul II and election of Benedict XVI was made by Declan Lynch in his Sunday Independent television review column on April 10.

And I can add just a couple of observations to the millions which have already been made. For the past week we have seen perhaps thousands of churchmen on television, we have heard them saying their pieces, and we have observed that the majority of them, if not exactly gay, have a certain indefinable quality of gayness about them.

How do you know ? Ah, you just know.

At first you pass no remarks on it, but there's a sort of a cumulative effect of all this gayness on our screens, all day every day - not that there's anything wrong with it.

The late Pope, by contrast, was made of different stuff. He clearly didn't have a gay bone in his body. Perhaps in some subliminal way this was the basis of all those descriptions of his "vigour", his determination to take the road less travelled.

Pope John Paul the Great was also Pope John Paul the Straight. And by the looks of it, we will not see his like again.