Yes, Virginia, there is a divine plan

In watching the essential new documentary, "The Divine Plan: Reagan, John Paul II & The End of the Cold War," I was reminded of the role Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II played not just in world history but my own history as well.

Reagan entered my life first. As a 12-year-old in 1960 John F. Kennedy emerged as my first political hero. It was a tribal thing. If you lived in an overwhelmingly Catholic neighborhood, he was everyone's hero. That took no great thought.

With his assassination in 1963, I transferred my loyalties to the Democratic Party or at least tried to. President Lyndon Johnson was hard to warm up to. The 1964 Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was not much fuzzier.

And then on the evening of Oct. 27, 1964, while channel-surfing, a much simpler task then than now, I stumbled on a pre-recorded speech given by Ronald Reagan on behalf of Goldwater. I watched, mesmerized.

Everything Reagan said made sense, and I had heard almost none of it before. With control of all broadcast information then just in a few hands, the kind of sophisticated conservative argument Reagan was making had never been aired before in prime time.

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Reagan's speech opened my mind and launched my political education. My spiritual education began years later when I first encountered Pope John Paul II.

The year was 1998. I was in Rome with my film crew shooting a documentary on the revival of the traditional movement in a Catholic Church that badly needed the revival. John Paul II had given the movement the green light 10 years earlier, and this was to be something of a commemoration.

At that time broadcast cameras were not allowed then inside the Vatican, I used a new, small camera that looked like something on which you would shoot home videos, but that was, in fact, broadcast quality.

With it, and with the help of the impressively pushy French priest serving as executive producer, I was able to angle within feet of the pontiff as he passed by in the Pope-Mobile.

A confession here is in order. Other than on ceremonial occasions, I had not been to Mass in 30 years. The "winds of change" that blew through the Catholic Church and other institutions in the late 1960s blew me out the back door.

As I maneuvered my way to the best angle, the pope passed by and waved, and my indifference melted away in a moment. There was magic here. Not all popes have it, but John Paul II surely did. I have been a regular Mass-goer ever since.

In his film, "The Divine Plan," Robert Orlando captures that magic but on a much later stage. The Polish Archbishop Karol Wojtyla ascended to the papacy in 1978. Reagan was elected president in 1980.

Each headed an institution that had lost its way in the world. In the 1970s, both Catholicism and the United States responded to an increasingly aggressive communist movement by attempting to appease it, to live with it, to make due.

As Orlando shows, God had other plans. The Soviets sensed this and through various cut-outs dispatched a Turkish assassin to kill John Paul II.

He almost succeeded. Six weeks earlier, a presumably deranged young American shot Ronald Reagan and almost succeeded in killing him too. Both men survived with their faith fortified and their personal bond reinforced.

The providential emergence of Margaret Thatcher in the depressingly compromised Great Britain strengthened the will of an enervated West. Thatcher too survived a 1984 assassination attempt by the IRA.

Ten years after they tried to take out the pope, the Soviets watched their empire collapse around them. Filmmaker Orlando reminds us that this did not happen by accident.

This exceptionally smart, well-produced documentary had a one-day theatrical release on Wednesday. To learn more about future showings, please check thedivineplanmovie.com.