It was likely a knockoff, but nonetheless it was kind of her to think of my sister. The pope at the time was Paul VI.

news, The NBC evening news with John Chancellor, and Father Guido Sarducci.

He was a personal friend of our church pastor and visited the parish when he was in the US in mid-30's. (yes, before my time.)
I was a student there in the 1940's, after Pacelli became Pope, so we as a whole were more aware of him than most children would be.

It was about the brief reign of Pope Luigi I

I don't remember too much, just that he was pope
and said to be infallible in matters of faith and morals.

In many ways a predecessor of Francis.

When I was little, my father was building our family a house out in the sticks. Three neighbors put their places up for sale, as they didn't like Irish Catholics. My grandfather had come from the Old Sod in 1879; my father was one of his 14 children. Those who put their places up for sale had gone to the same two-room rural school as my father and six of his siblings. A case can be made, it's true -- that knowing the clan could justify the attempt to sell their homes. But my first papel smear came when neighborhood kids were yelling insults about the pope, despite my being too young to know a Pope existed.

Note: the same three neighbors put their houses up for sale when my father & I built a house for my sister and her husband. He is black, and they had never been exposed to black human beings. But within a year, the "for sale" signs were taken down, and my brother-in-law was friends with everyone.

I yelled to my Mom “the pope died” and she told me that I was wrong and that happened a month ago.
I had to look it up but that was in 1978. The previous pope had died a month earlier. 😂

I remember learning about the Conclave then, in 1963. I was a senior in high school.

We just finished singing "My Country 'tis of Thee" when Sister Mary Vindictive made my friend stand back up and sing it by himself because he had not sang it with the rest of us.

I don't think he got past the first line of the song when the Popes' picture fell off the wall.

The lord works in mysterious ways.

Find the Pope in the pizza contest. 😉

dad's side of the family. She was a devoted Catholic and really the only religious person in our immediate family. She went to church every week and took me one time. In the mid or latter half of the 70s she made a trip to Italy and France with two of her sisters, who were Canadian. That trip meant everything to her. She visited the Vatican and had a rosary blessed by Pope John Paul VI, although I have no idea whether that means she actually met him in some capacity, or whether it was a very large group and some kind of symbolic blessing. My grandmother also always seemed to have Catholic writings lying around the house and various small books related to the Catholic church. But it must have been hard for her because really nobody else, not even my grandfather, was religious.

I learned that this person called the Pope was extremely important, especially to Catholics, but I wish I had been older when my grandmother made her trip because it genuinely was something very special to her and I feel like I ought to know more about it. My grandparents both lived through the Great Depression and didn't have a lot, so to make a trip to Europe was, for my grandmother, probably one of the key events of her life.

And Vatican 2

The fog got so bad that we stopped at a motel, in fact I think my father found it by driving up on the lawn. They made sandwiches for us and I had to wear my grandmother's nightgown to bed. And at that hour it was Christmas Eve mass on the TV, I believe it was Pope Paul. My big worry was that we had a puppy who I loved and was shut in the kitchen and my mother was worried since she'd left out the Christmas turkey to thaw. BTW, both the pup and the turkey were fine.