NEW YORK
New York Daily News
Denis Hamill
An Irish-American Pope would have made my mother’s life complete.
Hey, don’t laugh: Speculation swirls that New York’s Timothy Cardinal Dolan has an outside chance of succeeding retiring Pope Benedict.
In my mother’s home, the Pope was basically the King of the World.
My immigrant parents were raised Roman Catholics in the sectarian turmoil of Ulster, the six counties of Northern Ireland that in 1921 were divided from the 26 southern counties of the Republic of Ireland.
In Ulster, Protestant “loyalists” who swore allegiance to the British crown outnumbered Catholics, 2 to 1. My parents’ lives in Northern Ireland were defined by religious sectarianism akin to the way race has divided America. The reason my mother spelled my name with one N instead of the more common two in Dennis is because I was named for St. Denis, once the bishop of Paris. It didn’t matter that there were tasty rumors of St. Denis being a cannibal; he was an “R.C.”
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