Eighteenth-century British Jacobites wistfully toasted “the king over the water,” referring to exiled King James II, his successors, and the Jacobite hope for a Stuart restoration to the throne of the United Kingdom. Throughout the pontificate of John Paul II, the cardinal archbishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini, S.J., was a kind of “king over the water” for Catholics of the portside persuasion—the pope who should-have-been and might-yet-be. That never happened (although the progressives at the conclave of 2005 implausibly ran Cardinal Martini, then ill with Parkinson’s disease, in a failed attempt to block the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger). But longing for the lost cause continued.

Thus the day...