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I’ll never forget March 2005. Slumped in front of the TV, I watched with the world as Pope John Paul II lay dying. I wept at images of old and young thronging St. Peter’s Square and at news clips from the past: millions cheering his return to his native Poland; World Youth Day 1993 in Denver; the Berlin Wall crumbling; a glowing face, bowed in prayer. And most heart-rending: a feeble pontiff straining to utter a sound, betrayed by paralyzed vocal chords.
Riveted, I watched for hours—Thursday, Friday, Saturday. My tears streamed for this pope I never knew, for my dear friend Helen, who died of cancer two months before, and for numerous estrangements, losses, and griefs of a lifetime.
Dabbling and Drifting. Two miserable marriages, prolonged therapy and personal healing, and, eventually, two annulments had devoured more than two decades of my life, depleting me of any interest I might have had in a pope. Besides, I am a baby boomer. In the sixties I had nurtured an attitude of searing contempt towards authority. As a young Catholic in the post-Vatican II era, I had watched traditions collapse, and priests and religious leave the church in droves.
Searching for answers as structures crumbled around me, I dabbled in various non-Christian paths. Finally, in 1979 while participating in a Catholic…
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