Peter Manseau, author of the forthcoming Vows, a memoir of his Catholic priest father and his mother the nun, writes on the big daddy of his family: “During my first year of college, I had a pope fixation. I never went to church in those days, and I was not yet a religion major, so the reasons behind my preoccupation were neither pious nor academic. There was just an unnamable something that drew me to the image of the man. When my dormitory roommate taped to one of our shared cinderblock walls an enormous poster of a woman in a bikini and roller blades, I countered with the biggest picture I could find of John Paul II in his prime. Dressed in a snow white soutane, his face tan with travel, the new, young pope — “God’s athlete,” he was called back then — stood above St. Peter’s Square with his arms outstretched in blessing. I hung the photograph not as moral rebuke of my roommate’s decorative taste but as simple contrast — if he insisted on being boorish in one direction, I would answer equally in the other.

When my roommate put up a second poster in response — different woman, same outfit; this time on the ceiling above his bed — I complained that people could see his rollerblading ladies through the window.

‘It just makes us look stupid,’ I told him, ‘like dumb frat guys.’

‘Well, people can see the pope, too,’ he said. ‘How does that make us look?'” Read more of “The Last Papal Picture Show” at Killing the Buddha.