John Paul II Why all the fuss?

As the world, yes the world, marks the death of Pope John Paul II, an intriguing bit of lunacy has tickled out at the fringes of public discourse. Perhaps you’ve heard the question yourself. Why, the thinking goes, are the media paying so very much attention to the death of just one man who headed just one church. Would other faiths get that kind of coverage?
While it’s tempting to aggressively consider the source of such queries, often strident anti-Christian voices who had no complaint at all about endless, lurid and insanely disproportionate reporting on the Catholic Church’s sex scandal, a practical mathematical analysis and riposte is more becoming and fitting.
Just look at a flow chart.
It's not merely that Catholicism is one of the world's most popular faiths, with more than a billion Catholics worldwide.
The Catholic Church is the ONLY major religion which has just one earthly leader at the very top, to whom its members (and sometimes other Christians) turn as symbol, inspiration, chief executive, head of state, and spiritual guide.
Can anyone name the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church? Or the Anglican/Episcopalian Archbishop of Canterbury? How about the worlds #1 Islamic cleric? There's certainly no such centralized authority in Judaism.
The closest ANY other faith comes to the Pope is the Dalai Lama, and while there are hundreds of millions of Buddhists, Buddhism is much less a worldwide social force than Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.
...although the death of the Dalai Lama would certainly attract comparable attention.
There's also the fact that this particular pope has been an unusually charismatic, beloved, and successful one, with a truly dramatic story. His life as a priest was one of battling both Nazis and Communists in his homeland of Poland. As pope he was instrumental in mobilizing the Polish people against their opressors and ultimately overthrowing Poland's communist regime. He reached out to young people and other faiths in a way no pontiff before him ever did and his sheer longevity alone was such that his influence on the church was and will be extraordinary for decades to come.
Nope. Nothing inappropriate about a whole lot of attention to this death.
The world, Catholic and non Catholic alike, has lost a giant and it makes perfect sense to note his passage accordingly.

April 3, 2005