For countrymen, deep bond with 'father'

ROME -- As details emerged yesterday about the final hours of John Paul II's papacy, it became clear that the first truly global pontiff, the pope who visited 129 countries, departed the world in much the same way he entered it: a loyal son of Poland, a country he helped transform.

At the moment of death, according to the Vatican, he was surrounded not by powerful members of the Roman curia, but a small group of Polish priests and friends that one archbishop called his ''entourage."

Few of their names are familiar even to Vatican watchers. To some, they represent the fact that the first non-Italian pope in 455 years was never truly at home in the Vatican power structure. But to the millions of Polish Catholics who had come to think of this pope almost as a father, his final circle of companions -- including his secretary Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, Cardinal Marian Jaworski, and Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko -- provided a fitting coda to a week during which the pope signaled his deep loyalties to Poland, and which left Poles facing, for the first time in a quarter-century, the prospect of a non-Polish pope.

''Children have been born, they went to high school, they went to university -- all with the same pope," said Archbishop Szczepan Wesoly, rector of Rome's Polish church.

The depth of Polish dedication to John Paul, the first modern Polish figure on the world stage, was on full display yesterday in Rome. Fully half the national flags waving in St. Peter's Square at yesterday's Mass were Polish, and long after the Mass had ended, a circle of Polish Catholics had formed around an impromptu shrine in the square, singing hymns.

Renata Czarniak, 23, sat on a step near St. Peter's yesterday with a group of Polish friends who live in Rome. All in their 20s, almost no one in the group was alive before John Paul II was pope. ''I just don't believe he's dead," said Czarniak. ''I can't believe I won't see him anymore out his window."

That personal note was sounded over and over again yesterday by Polish Catholics, who almost invariably describe the pontificate of John Paul in familial terms.

The man they call ''father" reciprocated from his sickbed this week with a number of clear gestures to the people of Poland. The Vatican's Easter Mass included a greeting in Polish. In one of his final acts, according to Polish clerics interviewed for this story, the pope blessed a pair of crowns to be placed on icons in the monastery of Jasna Gora, home of Poland's immensely popular shrine to the Black Madonna.

Many devotees of Saint Faustina, a Polish visionary nun canonized by John Paul II, consider the very timing of his death to be deeply significant: He died precisely during the annual Feast of the Divine Mercy, a long Mass in her honor popular in Poland.

''Some people will say [the timing] is pure coincidence," says Thomas Groome, a professor of religious education at Boston College, ''and some will say it's the hand of God."

The man born in a small town called Wadowice has left a powerful stamp on the Roman Catholic Church, long the province of powerful Italian clerics. He appointed the vast majority of its cardinals and canonized far more saints than any other pope.

But for modern Poles, John Paul's more important legacy may not be religious. He was the first Polish figure to occupy the world stage and is widely credited for helping the Solidarity movement shake Soviet control to win Poland its independence.

''I think it's important to understand that the pope is as much a political figure as a religious figure" in Poland, said Jay Demerath, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. ''He really did provide a kind of bridge to the West for Poland."

As they looked ahead to a future almost certainly without a Polish pope, people interviewed yesterday suggested that a legacy of more than 26 years would not end with the death of one man.

''It's the end of his life," said Baj Kazimierz of Rome, ''not the end of his words."