As it happened, I shared John Paul’s apprehension about the future, but for precisely the opposite reason. He worried that Ireland, its most faithful child, might be lost to the church. I feared that it wouldn’t. The church had played its trump card: not just the first ever visit to Ireland by a reigning pope, but the arrival of a pope whose conservatism was almost irresistibly radiant. If John F. Kennedy had arrived sixteen years earlier as a herald of transformation, John Paul came as a harbinger of reaction. His message was plain. Things have gone far enough. One more step on this road of
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