Today, I offer a passage from Peggy Noonan’s outstanding biograpy of Pope John Paul II:
Once when Father [Richard John] Neuhaus, a New Yorker, visited the Vatican, John Paul asked him, as he always did, about the health of New York’s cardinal at the time, John Cardinal O’Connor, who was not well. “So I said, ‘Well, you know what Cardinal O’Connor said to be the other day? He said, “When I get up in the morning I pray that I’ll go to bed that night without having discouraged any impulse of the Holy Spirit.” So I said, ‘Holy Father, isn’t that a beautiful thing for him to say?’ And the pope says, ‘Yes, very beautiful. Very beautiful. But I told him that!’”