When Pope John Paul II slipped in his bathtub on the evening of April 28, he fractured more than his right thighbone. The papal itinerary for the next several months was also pretty well shattered, and before it can be rescheduled many disappointed people will be obliged to revise their own travel plans.

Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Popes representative in Washington, D.C., has recently been appointed head of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education (for Seminaries and Educational Institutions). Archbishop Laghi is leaving behind a hierarchy that he helped remake under the direction of John Paul II. As the Popes representative to the US. church he was intimately involved in the appointment of bishops (see "The Selection of Bishops," AM., Aug. 18, 1984). His legacy to the U S. church includes the bishops appointed during his tenure, some of whom will serve into the 21st century.

Occasionally, people ask me questions as if I’d become the Carl Sagan of the adolescent universe. I grant that 22 years of reading 40 reflection papers from each of what now amounts to about 3,500 high-school and college students has given me perhaps a better insight into what teen-agers think than, say, a first-time parent--and surely better than the teenager, but I still have more than a few reminders of my finitude and fallibility. One of them arrived in the mail last Friday, from a group of high-school principals, asking me to give a workshop on teen-age spirituality next winter in Thcson, Ariz.