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If it’s Friday, it’s Peggy Noonan:  A Life’s Lesson

“In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn’t. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn’t, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That’s what it really admires. That’s what we talk about in eulogies, because that’s what’s important. We don’t say, ‘The thing about Joe was he was rich.’ We say, if we can, ‘The thing about Joe was he took care of people.’”

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!’”