Mark Steyn Article

Truth and consequences
Mark Steyn's Passing Parade
March 15, 2013



Following my conversation with Hugh Hewitt on the media's conclave coverage, I thought I'd dust off some similar observations I made at the time of the last change of Pope - the death of John Paul II. The passage about The New York Times is as timely as ever. What follows originally appeared in The Irish Times and The Daily Telegraph, and is adapted and anthologized in my book Mark Steyn's Passing Parade:

"How many divisions has the Pope?" sneered Stalin of Pius XII. Uncle Joe's successors lived long enough to find out. John Paul II's divisions were the Poles who filled the streets to cheer him on his return as pontiff to his homeland in the summer of 1979, and the brave men who founded the Solidarity union 18 months later, and began the chain of events that within a decade swept the Communists from power in Central and Eastern Europe and finally Mother Russia itself. One day we will know the precise combination of Bulgarian Secret Service, East German Stasi and Soviet KGB that lay behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the Holy Father. But you can see why they'd be willing to do it. By then the sclerotic Warsaw Pact understood just how many divisions this Pope had.

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