The Pope is coming to town soon and unless his charisma is at very high pitch, he is not going to get the reception he got in days gone by. Since he is the same man and, in the view of many, the same Vicar of Christ, we wonder: how much of the reduced esteem, or enthusiasm, flows from acts for which he is personally responsible, how much from shifting public perspectives--particularly with the end of the Cold War.
For a long while the mere mention of Solzhenitsyn's name justified ...