What was your earliest papal memory?

[H2O Man]

11. Recommended.

When I was little, my father was building our family a house out in the sticks. Three neighbors put their places up for sale, as they didn't like Irish Catholics. My grandfather had come from the Old Sod in 1879; my father was one of his 14 children. Those who put their places up for sale had gone to the same two-room rural school as my father and six of his siblings. A case can be made, it's true -- that knowing the clan could justify the attempt to sell their homes. But my first papel smear came when neighborhood kids were yelling insults about the pope, despite my being too young to know a Pope existed.

Note: the same three neighbors put their houses up for sale when my father & I built a house for my sister and her husband. He is black, and they had never been exposed to black human beings. But within a year, the "for sale" signs were taken down, and my brother-in-law was friends with everyone.