“How did he look?” That was the question people would ask, for years, every time I attended a papal event. The pope in those days was John Paul II, who had the looks of a leading man and the gait of a ...

People pray at the tomb of St. John Paul II in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican April 2, 2025, the 20th anniversary of his death. Born Karol Wojtyla, he was the first pope from Poland and the first ...

In the 1970s, you were more likely to have a spaceship piloted by an extraterrestrial land in your backyard than the leader of the Catholic Church. The era of regular papal travel had not yet begun, ...