Dean's World

Note: This post will contain updated news stories on the Pope's passing so you should check back often.

Already Pope John Paul II is being acknowledged as a special spiritual leader: he was Pope longer than any Pope in modern history, had a charisma that jumped out at people of all ages and religions when they met him and watched him on the TV screen, and played a pivotal role in the downfall of communism.

CNN has now announced confirmation of his death...and details are pouring in as news stories pour out.

ON THE POPE'S DEATH MSNBC has this:

VATICAN CITY - Pope John Paul II died Saturday after a prolonged illness, the Vatican announced to the world. He was 84 and had led the Roman Catholic church for 26 years — the longest term of any modern pope.

The pontiff died in his Vatican chambers after his health quickly deteriorated in recent weeks.

Before the pope's death, thousands of pilgrims had gathered on St. Peter’s Square to stand vigil, many tearfully gazing up at his third-floor window. The faithful around the world joined them in prayer.

Vatican Cardinal Achille Silvestrini visited John Paul Saturday morning, accompanied by another cardinal, Jean-Louis Tauran.

“I found him relaxed, placid, serene. He was in his bed. He was breathing without labor. He looked like he lost weight,” Silvestrini said.

He said the when he and Tauran came into the room, the pope seemed to recognize them.

“The pope showed with a vibration of his face that he understood, indicating with a movement of his eyes. He showed he was reacting,” he added.

MORE DETAILS ON THE DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT from CNN:

"The Holy Father is deceased this evening at 9:37 in his private apartment," Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a written statement.

"Our beloved Holy Father John Paul II has returned to his home. Let us pray for him," he added.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's secretary of state, asked the throng of thousands of faithful who had congregated in St. Peter's Square for a few moments of silence as he announced the death to thousands gathered at the site. Members of the crowd bowed their heads to pray, some of them in tears.

They then burst into applause.

"Let perpetual light shine on him and let him repose in peace," he said.

AND THE LOSS IS NOT JUST SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL as Newsday points out:

For all his erudition and mysticism, Pope John Paul II was a gloriously human pope, not pale and other-worldly from years in a Vatican bureaucracy, but fully rounded and robust from toiling in the harsh light of the real world.

This pope felt the sting of his parents' deaths at an early age, worked with his hands, heard the rock-hard cacophony of a quarry and the boom of Nazi bombs, enjoyed belting out a good song. He lived an outsized, epic life — so full of novelistic, even cinematic, twists of plot that it might well have been written by Charles Dickens and filmed by Steven Spielberg. A major element of his uniqueness was his stunning versatility. In many fields of endeavor, Karol Wojtyla (pronounced voy-TEE-wah) was outrageously adept: as a poet, an athlete, a linguist, a playwright, an actor, a philosopher, an economic critic, a deft political strategist. His writing output was breathtaking in its volume and variety: from a tender, heartbreaking poem for his dead mother, to encyclicals that thundered against the relativism of the modern world by restating moral certainties and proclaiming "The Splendor of Truth," as he named one encyclical.

Only one pope ever wrote a play about married life, "The Jeweler's Shop," that became a movie starring Burt Lancaster in 1988.

No other pope can claim to have both lionized a man on the stage and then canonized him at the altar. As a seminarian and a young priest, Wojtyla wrote a play, "The Brother of Our God," about one of his Polish heroes, Adam Chmielowski, a 19th-Century artist, Polish patriot and founder of the Albertine Brothers and the Albertine Sisters. "This was my way of repaying a debt of gratitude to him," John Paul wrote in "Gift and Mystery," a 1996 book on the 50th anniversary of his ordination. As pope, John Paul canonized him and called that "one of my greatest joys."