A kiss is just a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.
OK, class, contrast and compare:
The Sharif Bible, a translation of the Bible in modern Arabic.
Pope kisses book.
As our valuable Aussie Protestant mate, DieHard the Hunter, has righly pointed out, and as everybody actually knows, the Catholic Church has never been so foolish as to propose that the Pope is intellectually or morally faultless, flawless, or foolproof, let alone impeccable, personally ---- but only that he will never be able to bind the Catholic Church to falsity in matters of faith and morals.
That means the Pope could be stupid or sinful (some of them, esp. during the Renaissance, were notoriously so) but cannot make an erroneous doctrine binding on the whole church. Thus "infallibility" is more a divine protection for the Church than a personal quality of the Pope, since it constitutes a divine promise that no matter how screwed-up a Bishop of Rome may be, he will not be able to make a dogma out of it to mislead the whole Church. (Keywords "gates" "hell.")
So whatever it was that John Paul was doing in the famous 9-year-old picture that has been around the world 10,000 times on the Internet, it was at worst an act of cringe-making personal error and not an erroneous definition of dogma.
Yeesh.
I would want to add that Pope John Paul was Polish after all, and therefore a kisser.
Any time anybody gave him anything, he kissed it as a sign of thanks. He kissed sombreros. CD's. Guitars. Sweatshirts. Soccer balls. Sandwiches. Photographs. Baseball caps. Pineapples. Personal correspondance (letters). Cheeks. Foreheads. Hands. Walls (in Jerusalem.)
He's famous for even getting on his knees and kissing the ground for godsake, and literally for God's sake because he was the kind of guy who easily and spontaneously expressed gratitude for gifts all the time.
It's pretty clear he was kissing the book "as gift" ("as soccer ball") and not as a liturgical gesture canonizing Islamic scripture.
I might render a different opinion if it had been Rowan Williams, GOL (for Groaning Out Loud), but, not unfairly, I'm going to give our Lolek the benefit of the doubt because this is the same guy who commissioned Cardinal Josef ("the Enforcer") Ratzinger to write "Dominus Iesus," which clarified that nobody is saved by anybody except by Jesus Christ Our Lord.
And if it turns out, as wideawake says, that it was an Arabic-language edition of the Bible--
Well, Holy Moses, people.