The 70,000 people in St. Peter's square the night Pope John Paul II died could not prepare me for the nearly four million more that arrived for the supreme pontiff's funeral on Friday. Imagine a mass of people nearly the size of a Penn State football crowd standing silent, still and utterly immobilized by the news of Karol Wojtyla's death. Imagine then, the tranquility of the crowd's songs that ascended heavenward as nuns, priests and bishops shepherded the flock in song.

Among Romans, it is common to hear a simple phrase, which translated means: When the pope dies, it's time to elect a new one. And its tenor is roughly equivalent to an American who says: Life goes on. The consensus of all the people I've consulted on the European side of the Atlantic is that this pope was different; there will be no other man capable of replacing Wojtyla.

The wait in line to view -- rather, I should say file past hurriedly -- the pope after he had died was up to 12 hours by the last day before his funeral. The line stretched from St. Peter's Basilica, which is in the heart of Vatican City, until it spilled onto the streets of Rome, about three to four kilometers away, which measures roughly the length of campus cut east to west from North Atherton Street to Bigler Road.

Pilgrims lined the banks of the polluted, brownish Tiber River, some carrying only their nation's flag with a black ribbon fixed to its finial. From Poland alone, the Roman news channels had estimated two million pilgrims.

Yet there were also Catholics from the more populous Catholic nations of the Philippines, Mexico and Nigeria. This pope transformed the church's image from that of Pius XII's cold, distant, indifferent church that witnessed Nazi atrocities.

John Paul II was the pope who asked pardon for the church's past sins, and as a penance, he progressively piloted the church into the harbors of human rights activism.

This was the pope who battled communism (and won) without a sword, without a rifle, without a missile being fired. This was also the pope who many criticized for his solid positions on abortion and contraception.

Shocking to witness -- at least according to my conception of the average papal enthusiast, an older woman whose home is adorned with crucifixes and prayer cards -- was the number of college-aged students in the massive crowds.

The night the pope died, I would estimate that the median age of the nearly 100,000 people was 21 or 22.

And on the Italian version of MTV, teens were sending in their thoughts on the pope from April 2 until April 8, which was the day of his funeral. Not only were they writing to say he was a good man, but they were saying how despite their aversion toward religion and Catholicism in general, they believed he left the world better than when he found it, and for this they were sad at his death.

It is true that life goes on. I say that because from the point of view of an American in Rome during this event, it may seem that the funeral and the conclave consume and overwhelm the city to the point of paralysis.

However, it's not as though the city appears to be holding its breath until the new pope is elected. Rather, conversation among Romans is of course somewhat about the new pope, but focuses more on the economic fate of one of the local soccer clubs, for instance. But in reality, the city has returned to normality, with its swarms of scooters and pocket-sized cars in spite of its four million guests.