Afternoon Baseball

This is a tardy recognition, but I was leafing through the April 11, 2005 copy of The New Yorker and saw their bit on John Paul II. For a publication that has been only slightly less eager than Harper's to make snarky remarks at all things non-New York liberal, whether on topic or not, they've had dynamite reactions to the Terri Schiavo event and the pontiff's death.
Here's a brief excerpt that I enjoyed, first about his monumental visit to Communist Poland and then on his legacy:

"How many divisions has the Pope?" Stalin once asked, and now there was an answer. "I beg you," the Pope said later in Krakow, "never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged." ....

His papacy has lasted twenty-six years, and his legacy--as a spiritual leader, a cultural critic, a thinker, a politician, a performer in the media age, and, in his last days, a man determined to provide an example from his own visible demise--is so encompassing that no obituary will make complete sense of it

With all the (often justified and thoughtful) criticisms taken at John Paul II, I expected them to do so as well. Instead, they realized the bigger picture of what the world, and not just Catholicism, has lost.