John Paul II in hospital

This is a familiar pattern of ups and downs at the end of life. I remember the first time I saw him on television, right after he had been elected pope. There he was a young 58, offered by the press as fit and vigorous, a skier, a hiker. There he was a Polish pope taking hold of reins that had long been held by Italians. I was an apostate Catholic then, quite nauseatingly so. Still, I had interest in a new pope. I wouldn't be following any of his teachings, I thought, but there was something about the ceremony of it all. That was 1978. Four years later in 1982, probably in September, I looked around me as I climbed the steps into St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. I wanted to make sure that no one I knew, by some odd chance, would see me go inside. I wouldn't want it to get around that I had been seen entering a church. It was the beginning of a long journey back.

Over the years I would take a lot of strength from JPII. On the night of August 14, 1993 at 10:30 pm, I was listening to him speak, I think it was at some event here in the U.S.

He said this, and I immediately wrote it down on a blank page at the front of the nearest available book, which happened to be an old copy of Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People:

Moral good is objective and a properly formed conscience can perceive it.