On May 13, 1982, Pope John Paul II flew to Portugal on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving for his life having been spared the year before. At the airport welcoming ceremony, the pope, reflecting that he’d been shot on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, mused that, “In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.” What we think of as coincidental is rather a facet of the divine plan for our lives that we’ve not fit into the proper frame. So I’ll take it as providential that I was reading Msgr. Stephen Rossetti’s book,
Diary of an American Exorcist
, when I recently visited Salem, Massachusetts, to speak at the Saint John Paul II Shrine of Divine Mercy.
