The first Pope, the disciple Peter, worked with his hands, but there can be few Popes who in an earlier life worked with dynamite in a quarry, as Karol Wojtyla did as a manual labourer during the Nazi occupation of his beloved Poland.

He continued to blast holes in people's preconceptions of what a Pope should be, right up until his death. He was the first Slav in history to become a Pope, and the first non-Italian in 455 years.

Popes were expected to issue statements from the Vatican and not venture out.

The much-beloved Pope John, when showing visitors around his personal apartment, once gazed sadly at the tiny embroidered slippers considered suitable footwear for a pope, and declared them part of the plot to prevent him going anywhere. Karol Wojtyla donned hiking boots, and travelled the world.

He has been seen in person by more people than any other individual in history, and that does not take into account the millions more who have seen him on television. He is a giant of a figure, and the carping nature of some of the criticisms levelled at him since his death reveal more about the smallness of the critics than they do about Pope John Paul.

He is greatly misunderstood, not least because any attempt to fit him into narrow categories of left or right, liberal or conservative, fail miserably. He may have been instrumental, through moral influence alone, in the fall of communism, but he reserved some of his sharpest censure for the excesses of the capitalist West.

He may have been seen as conservative on doctrine, particularly in the area of sexuality, yet this is the Pope who declared sexual love between a husband and wife to be an image of the inner life of the Trinity. Viewed from one angle, he is a creature of extraordinary contradictions. From another, he is a man of startling simplicity and unity of purpose. It is not possible to understand John Paul without acknowledging that he was a mystic, with a staggering depth of commitment to Christ.

Everything he has done, has been done with this one aim; to bring more people to deeper love of and commitment to Christ. Some of the most lyrical passages in his writings are devoted to Christ, to the eucharist, to his relationship with Mary, the mother of God.

He conducted an interior conversation too profound for most of us. Oddly enough, it resonated with the Dalai Lama, who spoke approvingly after meeting him, of his depth of insight. Pope John Paul opened channels to the great world religions unthinkable in the era of any other Pope, including praying at the Wailing Wall, and an address to Muslim youth in Casablanca.

As a child, his best friend was a Jew, and his pontificate went some way towards healing the almost reflexive anti-semitism once associated with Catholicism.

His devotion to God was not some airyfairy indulgence; it was a continual spur to improve the conditions of the children of God. In an address to the UN in 1995, he declared, "Love of Christ does not distract us from interest in others, but rather invites us to responsibility for them, to the exclusion of no one."

He challenged communism because it damaged human dignity by subordinating everything to the interests of the state; he challenged capitalism because it damaged human dignity by subordinating everything to the interests of profit. He opposed the death penalty because it destroyed infinitely precious human life, no matter how despised that life might be by society: he opposed abortion for the same reason.

He cracked down on dissident theologians (fewer than the press would have us believe) because he believed that they were substituting ideology or their own ideas for the truth of the gospel. Yet he held dialogues on a regular basis, right up until he died, with intellectuals and philosophers of all shades of opinion who were invited to spend time together with him, discerning and discussing the key issues of the age.

He wrote not volumes, but a substantial library of work, which it will take decades to sift through and analyse. He was seen as authoritarian and centralising, yet Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who worked closely with him, has commented that the Pope's vision was not of some uniform monolith, but of thousands of fragile flames which it was his role to strengthen and nourish.

The Pope encouraged new movements of lay people whhenever he could, while urging religious orders to return continually to the vision of their founders. The West might criticise him for his attitude towards the treatment of AIDS: the developing world knew that he was fighting continually for an end to the poverty which made AIDS so difficult to combat.

At times he was the only world leader preaching justice and debt forgiveness in season and out for the developing world, where he was, unsurprisingly, adored.

Why was he not adored in Ireland? Well, some did, but few of them seemed to work in the media.

He represented a strong and confident face of Christianity, and of Catholic Christianity, which discomforted many who thought they had seen off the challenge to their own influence from that particular corner.

He was also not a good administrator, which meant that the bureaucratic stranglehold of the Curia increased in a way it might not have had under a more "hands on" managerial type. He challenged, but could not stem the tide of materialistic individualism, but he never gave up on the West.

An imperfect man? Surely. Yet at a time when world leaders all seem too small for their task, John Paul grew in stature, even as his physical frailty increased. In time, the greatness of this extraordinary man will be even more fully acknowledged.

Breda O'Brien is an Irish Times columnist