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Pope Francis has passed on, and it's a shame, he seemed like a nice guy who had his heart in the right place. But he was up against a deeply entrenched bureaucracy. To put it mildly. He'd been precariously placed atop the ultimate 'deep state', whose roots extend all the way back to the Roman Empire. He was in the end at least able, in these latter days, to put a recognizably human face on Roman Catholicism, an achievement that shouldn't be dismissed. He wasn't my Pope, though. I only had one Pope; John Paul. By the time he passed, however, I'd long since moved on from the Catholic programming of my childhood, and viewed the Vatican, Catholicism, and religion in general, in a much more detached, clinical way. So, after JP II, any lingering personal feelings of attachment to all of that ancient nonsense had been deleted from my consciousness (or so I thought, until I visited the Vatican years later, and upon arriving, burst into tears, but that's another story). Of course, the media