Free Republic

When the Vatican announced that World Youth Day would be held in Denver in 1993, many news experts predicted that the event would be a failure. The United States, they said, was different than countries like Poland and Argentina, where previous World Youth Days had met great success. The United States, they claimed, lacked an entrenched tradition of Catholic pilgrimage, the traveling distances required to assemble a large gathering from across the country were too large, and most importantly American young people would simply be uninterested in the pope or his message. On August 10, 1993, stunned reporters crumpled their...

The eminently readable Peggy Noonan, best known as a columnist and contributing editor at The Wall Street Journal has penned an in-depth and fascinating biographical sketch of the late great Pope John Paul II, all in 256 pages. Noonan, the New York Times bestselling author of ‘When Character Was King’, has produced a faithful snapshot of the life and times of the last Pope of the 20th century in a format accessible to the common man who lacks the time to pour over the tens of thousands of pages in tomes detailing John Paul’s heroic story. In ‘John Paul the...

Pope John Paul II's last words before his death were "let me go to the house of the Father", according to documents released by the Vatican.His words were spoken in his native Polish to aides hours before he died last April. They are preserved in a new 220-page volume which chronicles the last two months of the late pontiff's life. It is the first time the Vatican has published such a detailed account of any pope's final moments. Parkinson'sCorrespondents say the report is an unprecedented move, as the death of a pope has always been surrounded by secrecy. The book...

WARSAW (AFP) - Eighty- five percent of Poles would like their beloved native son, the late pope John Paul II, to be named the country's patron saint, according to an opinion poll released. Just eight percent of those asked opposed the idea of proclaiming John Paul II the patron saint of the predominantly Catholic country, according to the survey of 800 people conducted by the Pentor institute on April 13. John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla in the southern Polish town of Wadowice in 1920, died on April 2 at age 84. Poland currently has three patron saints, Adalbert, Stanislas...

Pope John Paul II and President Bush during their first meeting at the Pontiff's summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, in July 2001. (AP Photo / Arturo Mari) No one would mistake John Paul II for an evangelical Protestant. But he contributed to a dramatic warming of relations between evangelicals and Catholics that may mark a turning point not only in American politics but in the history of Christianity. DURING THE 1960 presidential campaign, leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals - including Harold John Ockenga of Boston's historic Park Street Church - joined other Protestants in warning the nation...

 HISTORY LABORS--A WORN machine, sick with torsion, ill-meshed--and every repair of an old fault ruptures something new. Or so it seems, much of the time. Our historical choices are limited, constrained by the poverty of what appears possible at any given moment. To be a good leader is, for most figures who walk the world's stage, merely to pick the best among the available options--to push back where one can, to hold on to the good that remains, to resist a little the stream of history as it seems to flow toward its cataract.For the past decade and a half,...

Everyone has spoken this past week of John Paul II's role in the defeat of Soviet communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe. We don't know everything, or even a lot, about the quiet diplomatic moves--what happened in private, what kind of communications the pope had with the other great lions of the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher. And others, including Bill Casey, the tough old fox of the CIA, and Lech Walesa of Solidarity. But I think I know the moment Soviet communism began its fall. It happened in public. Anyone could see it. It was one of the great...

Our church bell tolled 84 times. We draped the front door in purple and black. A framed action photo of the Holy Father was on display in the sanctuary, surrounded by the Easter flowers, propped between the new Paschal Candle and the baptismal font used only last week to welcome and sanctify the new members of our parish. The mourning came twice: first yesterday, prematurely, when the false announcement came, then this afternoon when I was alone and Mary was teaching the new altar servers. An angel-weeping drizzle had been falling all day. I wiped some tears. I turned on...