It was 100 degrees as the sun was setting, and a toddler with red curls was running toward the Ferris wheel at the National Mall, installed as part of the Great American State Fair. The kid was trying to get my attention — he seemed to like being the center of things. I looked around to find an adult he belonged to and realized how vulnerable a precocious little one (with an overactive set of legs) can be. His young father found him — too flustered, it seemed, to be worried yet and perhaps still learning how much his life has changed. Each and every one of us is on a journey, and we’re worthy of protection.
“Nothing surpasses the greatness or dignity of a human person,” said Pope John Paul II on the National Mall in October 1979, during a Catholic Mass, right here before God and man and the Smithsonian. The Little Sisters of the Poor, who serve the elderly poor, and the Hawthorne Dominicans, who care for elderly cancer patients, may have had to go to court recently to fight for religious liberty, but we’re still a long way from the days of the infamous anti-Catholic Know-Nothings.
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