I don't often quote from the Telegraph as I do below. But this was interesting. First we have a protestant Royal Marriage moved to accomodate a Roman Catholic Funeral. Now, as the marriage goes ahead in the state registry office, we have gossip about the politics of Holy Communion.
I never met the Pope. Maybe he was a deeply spiritual man the same way Rowan Williams is such a one.
Maybe not. In a time of ever increasing uncertainty and threat any kind of strong leader becomes very popular.
The heart of Catholicism is the communion. The Pope may or may not have administered the sacrament to Mr Blair as he did to Cherie.
It is exactly the kind of thing we would expect from Blair though, taking the Pope's sacrament just as if he were a good obedient catholic and still ignoring the Pope's judgement that the war was wrong.
Does Blair and the populace he leads believe in anything substantial beyond power?
I will let you decide. I like Chesterton's remark that when people stop having beliefs they believe in anything rather than nothing. Either way it is empty and deplorable.
Dumb and dumber?
"Next week, however, an authoritative account of it will appear in Garry O'Connor's new papal biography Universal Father, based on a 90-minute interview with Cherie Blair. Only one key detail is missing.
On the day before the Mass, while Vatican officials let two-year-old Leo sit on one of the Pope's thrones, Blair had made a fruitless attempt to persuade the Holy Father to soften his opposition to the Iraq war.
But their lack of agreement did not spoil what happened the next morning, which Cherie describes as the high point of her entire time as Prime Minister's wife.
At 8am, the Blairs arrived in the Pope's private chapel to find him already sitting facing the altar, immersed in prayer. "The image he gave," writes O'Connor, "was for Cherie a symbol of both suffering and the defeat of suffering. When he began to say Mass, he sprang to life: he said all of it, the first part in English but, when he came to the Eucharistic prayer, in Latin.
"Blair, in an off-the-peg suit and muted tie, read the first reading from Isaiah: 'I it is who must blot out everything.' Euan, his eldest son, read the responsorial prayer: 'Heal my soul, for I have sinned against you,' and Kathryn, their daughter, the second reading, from Corinthians: 'Jesus was never yes or no: with him it was always yes.' "
O'Connor then reports that "the Pope gave the family communion, while the other celebrants gave communion to the rest of the congregation". What he does not spell out is whether the Prime Minister took communion.
Most people have assumed that he did not, since - after years of receiving the sacrament when he accompanied his family to Mass in London - Mr Blair had been told by the late Cardinal Basil Hume that this was not appropriate for a non-Catholic. He duly stopped.
On March 21, 2003, however, the Catholic Herald claimed that the Pope had personally given Tony Blair Holy Communion - the first time in history that a British prime minister had received the sacrament from the hands of the pontiff.
The story was followed by such a flurry of denials that the newspaper was forced to withdraw the claim in its next issue.
Yet it was perfectly true, as the Pope's biographer Garry O'Connor discovered from several sources, including the papal chamberlain's office. He glossed over it in his book "out of respect for the family," he says, but The Telegraph this week also independently verified the story.
Did John Paul II break his own rules by administering communion to an Anglican? Not quite: there was, at the time, a provision that non-Catholics could ask to receive communion "on a unique occasion for joy or for sorrow in the life of a family".
Tony Blair presumably made such a request, and would also have been expected to assent to the Catholic doctrine that the body of Christ is really present in the consecrated bread and wine.
No previous British prime minister has ever held this belief (though Harold Macmillan, who was High Church, probably came close to it.)
Ironically, only two weeks after Tony Blair took communion from the Pope, the Roman Curia issued fierce guidelines imposing a virtual ban on distributing communion to non-Catholics.
John Paul must have known in advance that this was coming. Yet he still granted Blair's request.
"That was typical of the man," says O'Connor. "His instinct in these situations was always to say yes, and he often had to be restrained by officials who wanted him to say no."
So the Blair family knew from their own experience that John Paul was not the fundamentalist bigot of Islingtonian demonology.
The Blairs' starstruck admiration for the Pope may also help us to untangle one of the mysteries of these chaotic last few days. On whose instructions did the Prince of Wales postpone his register office wedding and subsequent church blessing until Saturday?
On Monday, Paddy Harverson, the Clarence House press officer, said that as soon as the Prince and Mrs Parker Bowles knew that the wedding and funeral would clash, they realised that it was "absolutely the right thing" to delay the wedding.
The decision was theirs alone, he added. "There was no communication with No 10 before or after."
That sounds straightforward enough. It would be more convincing, however, if Clarence House had not announced shortly after the Pope's death that the Windsor Guildhall Ceremony and marriage blessing would take place regardless of any clash on Friday.
Did the Prince's staff make this statement off their own bat, without consulting him? That seems incredible.
It certainly strikes one former senior courtier as preposterous. "Taken in conjunction, the two Clarence House statements imply that Charles was adamant that he wasn't going to postpone the wedding, but was then forced to - and has been desperately trying to spin his way out of that situation ever since," he says.
If so, who did the forcing? Mr Harverson may have been stretching the truth when he said that the decision was the couple's "alone", but there is no reason to think that he told a brazen lie about the lack of communication between the Prince and Downing Street.
But was there any communication with Buckingham Palace? According to reliable reports, it was the Queen who ordered Charles to spend Friday morning listening to Latin plainchant in Bernini's magnificent piazza rather than marrying his long-term mistress in the Guildhall at Windsor.
Why? The Queen (unlike her late sister) has no leanings towards Catholic mysticism: she shares the robust, no-frills churchmanship of her father and grandfather. (It is a brave clergyman who wears a Roman chasuble in the presence of his Monarch.) She respected Pope John Paul, but her tribute to him was the least effusive of any head of state.
On the other hand, she is no more keen than the late pontiff on register office weddings - and, as we know, will be boycotting this one. So she is unlikely to have turned a hair at instructing her son to postpone the event.
But the attendance of the Prince of Wales at the funeral of a pope - especially this pope - has ramifications that oblige the Sovereign to follow the advice of her Prime Minister and at least listen to that of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And it is that advice, rather than the Queen's personal wishes, that brought about Charles and Camilla's embarrassing change of plan - that, and the fact that, as one Royal confidant puts its, "half their bloody guests are going to be in Rome".
According to some sources, the Archbishop was the first person to insist that the Prince of Wales represent the Queen in Rome on Friday.
Charles, far from "immediately" concurring, as Paddy Harverson put it, strongly resisted the suggestion.
That is when the Queen is reported to have ordered him to go. In doing so, she was also respecting the wishes of the Prime Minister, who appears to have accepted the invitation to the funeral at a time - Monday morning - when the wedding was still scheduled for Friday.
The fact that, as Peter Oborne notes in this week's Spectator, Tony Blair had "carefully RSVP'd" his wedding invitation several months ago seems to have counted for nothing.
By Monday evening, as the Prince was ushered into Westminster Cathedral, his staff had more or less succeeded in portraying the postponement as an act of statesmanship.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, sensing the awkwardness of the situation, did his best to remedy it. As Vespers ended, he peeled himself off from the final procession and hurried to the West Door to greet the Prince and Mrs Parker Bowles and say how sorry he was that their wedding plans had been disrupted.
The heir to the throne replied with a wintry smile.
"The strange death of Protestant England" read a headline in the Guardian the next day. "Catholicism hasn't been this chic since Bloody Mary burned Rowan Williams's first Protestant predecessor at the stake."
And it is true that foreign tourists in England could have been forgiven for thinking that our tabloid newspapers were edited from, say, Galway.
"Safe in heaven," revealed the Mail On Sunday. "John Paul the Great," proclaimed a "memorial issue" of the Mirror. Just the week before, coincidentally, Michael Howard had told the Catholic Herald that he saw no reason why the monarch should not be a Catholic - or marry one.
Yet the strange death of Protestant England, and what the historian Mark Almond calls "the hollowing-out of the Protestant Succession", is emphatically not the same thing as the rebirth of Catholicism.
Cardinal Hume discovered this when he incautiously talked about "the conversion of England", and then spent the next decade watching his churches empty. Mass attendance will be higher than usual tomorrow, but will quickly revert to its disastrously low level.
A better clue to this week's Mediterranean-style outpourings is a saying attributed to G K Chesterton - that when people cease to believe in something, they do not believe in nothing: they believe in anything. The death of the Pope, like the death of Diana, has briefly satisfied a spiritual hunger that feeds off emotion and spectacle rather than doctrine.
And how interesting that both events have, to an extent, been appropriated by the Blairs.
This is not to imply that Tony and Cherie's Christianity is any sense bogus; but it is vastly more flexible than that of the old Polish gentleman who, at least for a few days, has been granted the status of spiritual leader of the whole world.
Cherie's Catholicism embraces the cause of women's ordination, something that John Paul II specifically forbade any Catholic to support. Tony has attended Masses for years without ever picking up the Catholic message that late-term abortion is infanticide. He is going into this general election as the only party leader who does not support a lowering of the abortion limit to 20 weeks.
If John Paul II had foreseen that, we can be sure of one thing: he would not have allowed the British Prime Minister to receive Holy Communion."
•Universal Father: A Life of Pope John Paul II, by Garry O'Connor, is published by Bloomsbury on April 18. To order for £16 + £2.25 p&p, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222
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