These days the Pope--even as he lays dying--seems to be a very divisive figure for many Americans.
I doubt many remember the enthusiastic chants which greeted his first tour of the U.S. in 1980. Just as some might forget the positive role he's played during his reign, especially the early years. For example:
Constantly drawing on his background as a native Pole under a repressive Moscow regime, he was an inspiration to many in the countries behind the Iron Curtain and by numerous accounts deserves much credit for the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall.
Similarly, while his support for the doctrine of liberation theology certainly ebbed and flowed in his years as a Cardinal and then Pope, his early apparent embrace of the doctrine provided an inspiration to many Catholics in Latin America at a time when it seemed that the only doctrine that their neighbors to the north wanted to embrace was that what is good for United Fruit is good for the peasants and the poor.
I never thought the Pope was quite the same after the attempt on his life in 1991. I think it slowed and/or tempered a lot of the fervor he had first brought to his position as Pope.
What might have been . . .