“Where were you in ’82?”

Sean Patrick Lovett is currently in the United Kingdom awaiting Pope Benedict XVI .
He filed this report :

You should never look at old photographs.
They only remind you of how quickly time passes – and of how old you are getting.
But it wasn’t my fault: the picture was in a folder labelled “The Historic Visit to Great Britain of Pope John Paul II”. And there I was, 28 years younger, doing a radio commentary in Canterbury with the Pope and Archbishop Runcie right behind me.
Looking at the picture now, what strikes me isn’t so much the air of youthful enthusiasm (or the abundance of hair) – but the overwhelming feeling of how simple everything was back then. Or is it just a nostalgic imagination playing tricks on me?

Those of you who are under 30 years of age might not remember (of course you don’t) that 1982 was the year CD’s were first launched onto a sceptical music market that didn’t believe they would last the summer. While we were rocking to the rhythms of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, the more erudite among us were thrilling to the prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year. Movie goers were raving over the Oscar-winning “Chariots of Fire”, while others mourned the untimely deaths of Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly. While sports fans cheered over Italy’s World Cup win in Spain, Time Magazine announced that its “Man of the Year” was – the Computer.

Alright. Maybe I am nostalgic after all. Who wouldn’t be?
In 1982 the only articles on “sex abuse” were those suggesting that too much love-making was bad for your health. “Kamikaze” was a word only a World War II historian would recognize. And the biggest threats to the survival of the planet were called Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. One of the top news stories of 1982 was the banning of corporal punishment in schools (finally). Caning, without parental consent, would henceforth be considered in breach of the Human Rights Convention.

Enough. All I really wanted to say was that, compared with all the conflict and controversy we’ve seen leading up to Benedict XVI’s visit to the United Kingdom, the trip made by his predecessor 28 years ago seems like a walk in the park with grandpa. Which is why I can’t help wondering what happened. When did we start changing and how did we become so complicated?

As you know, the theme of Pope Benedict’s U.K. visit is: “Heart speaks unto heart”.
I have another photograph: this one is of John Paul II at Wembley Stadium in London. Stuck on the back is a piece of the speech he gave there. It was also about hearts: “The heart of man is restless and troubled” – he said. “Man conquers space…but is confused about the direction in which he is heading. It is tragic that our technical mastery is greater than our wisdom about ourselves.”

Simple and straight from the heart.
Nothing nostalgic about that.

I'm Sean Patrick Lovett