What was your earliest papal memory?

[Mike 03]

17. I saw how important this person was to my grandmother on my

dad's side of the family. She was a devoted Catholic and really the only religious person in our immediate family. She went to church every week and took me one time. In the mid or latter half of the 70s she made a trip to Italy and France with two of her sisters, who were Canadian. That trip meant everything to her. She visited the Vatican and had a rosary blessed by Pope John Paul VI, although I have no idea whether that means she actually met him in some capacity, or whether it was a very large group and some kind of symbolic blessing. My grandmother also always seemed to have Catholic writings lying around the house and various small books related to the Catholic church. But it must have been hard for her because really nobody else, not even my grandfather, was religious.

I learned that this person called the Pope was extremely important, especially to Catholics, but I wish I had been older when my grandmother made her trip because it genuinely was something very special to her and I feel like I ought to know more about it. My grandparents both lived through the Great Depression and didn't have a lot, so to make a trip to Europe was, for my grandmother, probably one of the key events of her life.