From an assessment of Pope John Paul II by Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times:
But Mr. [James] Carroll’s most forceful point is one that nearly all of television’s elegies have obscured in all their effort to cast John Paul II as, above all, a rock star.
In short, he said the pope was always suspicious about-and often contemptuous of-the very basis of American life. As Mr. Carroll put it, “He’s profoundly suspicious of democracy.”
Mr. Carroll continued, “He’s a man of tremendous modern sensibility, capable of being at home with rock musicians and young people, and yet he has staked everything on protecting a view of the church that has it roots in the Middle Ages.”