It’s been more than a decade and a half since Catholics around the world converged on St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City for the solemn funeral Mass of St. Pope John Paul II, a beautiful event that turned out to be the pope’s final lesson to the church on the high art of liturgical prayer. With no immediate props but his own coffined body, he delivered the final soliloquy of his papacy, a wordless sermon on the importance of remaining steadfast in one’s commitment to a life of prayer.

The final details of the scene had been choreographed months in advance, its basic form built up over centuries by the deaths of other popes. Countless viewers, perhaps thinking themselves cheated for having to rely on TV coverage of the service, were instead treated to sweeping, panoramic views of Vatican Hill and close-ups of ceremonial details that even those dignitaries assigned the choicest seats couldn’t have enjoyed. It was as if the bishops of the Second Vatican Council, in their efforts a half century earlier to give the church a good “airing out,” really had succeeded in throwing open the church’s doors and windows.

St. Pope John Paul II may have wanted it that way, having never been one in life to confuse the inherent mysteries of the faith with the means adopted by the church for veiling its rites from public view. Through his death, the former actor-turned-pope with a knack for stagecraft called a vast ecumenical audience to the doorstep of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Open-air Masses were a familiar part of Karol Wojtyła’s papacy. His historic trips to the world’s great cities always included public celebration of the Eucharist at enormous parks or sports stadiums dressed up to serve as sacred spaces. He attracted to those places great throngs of people eager to hear that their lives mattered and that the world they inhabited was capable of redemption. It wasn’t the amplitude or shock quotient of his message but its basic humanity that St. Pope John Paul II’s listeners found so arresting. “Christianus alter Christus,” he told listeners over countless booming PA systems. “Every Christian is, another Christ. ”