To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose the person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best It was 1982 and I was 12 years old when I watched John Paul II transform a parched patch of Coventry Airport into a sacred space. Until this point, most of us my age would have had little sense of what it meant to be Catholic in Britain – but the experi­ence of being at that Mass connected me to the universal Church in a profound way. And it was being celebrated by a man who, with his relentless global travels, had made himself a lightning rod for that connection. Fast-forward to 1991, and the Polish shrine of Czestochowa. The reverberations of the fall of the Berlin Wall were only beginni