Between the Lines

During his travels in America, John Paul delivered 49 speeches, prayers, greetings and homilies. The major speeches he wrote himself, in longhand, always in Polish, sometimes breaking into song as he worked. Once aides translated the texts into English he revised the speeches again before delivery. The style was consistently genial and polite, often rhetorical, at times passionate, invariably authoritative. As these excerpts show, the Pope always sounded as if he meant exactly what he said.

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