Very Prescient!

Was National Review's 1978 Editorial on the ascension of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to the papacy.

At the same time, the papacy of John Paul II may help prevent the satellization of the West; may prevent it, in fact, by opening up a huge fault along the Western edge of the Soviet empire, where Catholicism still has immeasurable latent power. That a Pope can emerge from the captive nations is as inspiring a fact as that a Solzhenitsyn can emerge from the Gulag Archipelago.

John Paul II's accession coincides nicely with a more earthy clue to Soviet weakness. Chairman Hua Kuofeng has lately touched base at the vulnerable southwestern points of the Soviet border: Iran, Rumania, Yugoslavia. The lights must be burning late in the Kremlin.

How times have changed. The above passage starts off by hoping the Pope can stave off further Sovietization of the Western world.

You really need to read the whole article! It is very stirring and read in retrospect it is astounding how accurate the sense of the article is. It starts off by hedging its bets on Pope John Paul II but goes onto a very accurate reading of the Man and the future.

I keep old National Reviews around and return to them from time to time to study how the articles see into the future. National Review fares pretty well when it comes into future sight!

I wonder if Ronald Reagan had anything to do with that editorial?