At the time, it seemed to me that this adulation was definitive. These young people were, give or take a few years, all my age. They had all grown up after television and the arrival of sex, after industrialization and Gay Byrne. Yet here they were entirely in thrall to a conservative vision of who they were and how they should live their lives. It was only looking again at the film of those fourteen minutes that I grasped what was going on. That unstoppable noise, that torrent of sound, was entirely of their own devising. The pope was helpless, powerless. He had lost control.
