Funeral homily celebrates Pope's earlier life

VATICAN CITY - Pope John Paul has been remembered at his funeral more for his vitality, intellect and love for sports and the young than for his last years of suffering.

In a homily at Friday's funeral frequently interrupted by waves of applause, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took the focus off the image of an elderly Pope bent over with illness to celebrate his whole life from his youth in Poland.

The young Karol Wojtyla's love of literature, theatre and poetry, which shone through in many of his writings as an old man, contrasted sharply to his job working in a chemical plant "surrounded and threatened by the Nazi terror", Ratzinger said.

Ratzinger remembered how the Pope started to read theology and philosophy, then entered a clandestine seminary during World War Two to start training for a priesthood that would eventually lead him to Rome as the first non-Italian pope in centuries.

In his rise to the top, Wojtyla learned he was being named auxiliary bishop of Krakow when on a canoeing trip with a youth group on the Mazury lakes in northeast Poland, a fitting setting for a Pope remembered for his appeal to the young.

Ratzinger said the Pope had been sustained in his faith and service by three Bible verses, including "I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last," which he said inspired the Pontiff's many trips to his flock around the world.

"He really went everywhere, untiringly, in order to bear fruit," the German cardinal said as thousands of foreign pilgrims crammed into St. Peter's Square clapped.

Moving higher in the Church gave the Pope less time to enjoy his literature and study, which Ratzinger said "must have seemed to him like losing his very self, losing what had become the very human identity of this young priest".

But remembering Jesus' saying that anybody who lost his life for Christ would gain it, Ratzinger said the Pope's early love of words was returned to him as he "gave new vitality, new urgency, new attractiveness to the preaching of the Gospel".

"He roused us from a lethargic faith ... 'Rise, let us be on our way!' he continues to say to us even today," he said.

Ratzinger spoke only briefly of the Pope's 26-year papacy, using Bible passages to remember his love for all nations and his exhortation to believers to "stand firm in the Lord".

Only at the end of the homily did Ratzinger touch on the Pope's very public suffering in his last years.

"Impelled by this vision (that suffering is an expression of love), the Pope suffered and loved in communion with Christ and that is why the message of his suffering and his silence proved so eloquent and so fruitful," he said.

- REUTERS