Forty-five years ago, the
New York Times
cast its gimlet eye over the first three days of Pope John Paul II’s return to his Polish homeland. Reading the signs of those times through the conventional wisdom of the day, the Gray Lady then offered a typically
ex cathedra
judgment, in a June 5, 1979, editorial: “As much as the visit of John Paul II to Poland must reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.”