You can be entirely on board for today's Stormont, believe that however unlikely or brazen it must be welcomed as a huge advance, and still cringe at the headline "McGuinness hopes for papal visit". Coming out of Mass after the elevation of Cardinal Brady, the former IRA leader sounded as though he had been making up to prelates and delighting the pious for a lifetime, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
He was also starry-eyed among the frescoes, plainly enchanted by Roman splendour. Even at this stage in the procession of unprecedented sights, Martin McGuinness in the Vatican was worth catching. Interviewed by television reporters from back home, he might have had one eye on an electorate which almost certainly contains many more devout and conservative Catholics than free-thinkers. He was also there to deliver formal congratulations from Belfast's devolved administration to the new cardinal.
His fulsome assurance to papal itinerary-planners that a Pope Benedict visit to the North "would be regarded as a particularly joyous occasion", welcomed by Catholics but also by Protestants, was a long way from the contemptuous IRA reaction to the previous papal visit, when today's Derry politician was at the very least second in command in his own city.
But then it is almost 30 years since Pope John Paul in Drogheda said "on my knees I beg you" to the "men of violence" and was spurned with silent contempt. It is less than one year since the Executive's First Minister and McGuinness colleague Ian Paisley kicked off the Twelfth by denouncing the pope for "unchurching all other churches". As indeed Benedict had done that very week in the course of reasserting the primacy of Rome, when almost incidentally he described other Christian denominations as not true churches.
Compared with past Paisley allusions to Rome, the eve-of-Twelfth statement was meek stuff - hindsight now suggests coloured by the new deal much like the Vatican McGuinness. The DUP hope that stability and the rewards of office will still deliver the vote, but a whole strand of opinion has been tamped down by shock and bruised loyalty. Free Presbyterian and grassroots DUP dismay at their leader's sudden about-face may never be fully articulated.
The sentiment of many northern Catholics, on the other hand, was accurately enough represented in Rome by McGuinness. Sinn Féin republicanism fenced its way through the Troubles with the Catholic Church: both emerged to face the future with characteristic commitment to their own interests and willingness to do whatever those dictate.
Years of mutual fear and loathing have left marks, though the young know nothing about walkouts when the IRA was criticised from the pulpit, standoffs at IRA funerals when priests refused to allow coffins ornamented in paramilitary regalia into churches: nor that priests filled half the church at the south Armagh funeral of a hunger-striker whose brother was chief celebrant of the Requiem Mass.
Cardinals Tomás Ó Fiaich and Cahal Daly, Bishop Eddie Daly and Monsignor Denis Faul expressed between them the same condemnation of violence with a range of nuances, most of them mindful that lay and clerical church alike encompassed very different attitudes towards the "Provos".
And republicans themselves were a broad church, leadership fronted up by the publicly devout Adams, Sinn Féin's position on abortion swiftly redirected away from its brief support for a woman's right to choose.
The SDLP, having lost political primacy in the course of delivering a settlement, can only look on now while the new order crystallises. The party was represented in Rome by the low-key Fermanagh MLA Tommy Gallagher, no match for a McGuinness with stars in his eyes. Finding an effective and appropriate new SDLP stance is as difficult as for the Ulster Unionists, their partners in relegation.
It may have been the sting of seeing the Fermanagh SDLP man upstaged and a belated competitiveness that spurred Margaret Ritchie, the sole SDLP Minister, to write on Wednesday to the First and Deputy First Ministers urging a Stormont reception for the new cardinal. But the party may also be trying to read the community from which they also get their vote - how many Catholics still want to see a sudden catastrophic crack in the veneer of Paisley the Moderate? The old Paisley liked to say that the pope and his minions controlled the IRA. He never quite depicted a former IRA leader turning up in Rome in the baggage train of an Irish cardinal.
But having taken a long run at it, the North's First Minister will not be bumped back to his old ways. Performer above all, he may even have watched with envy the Deputy First grandstanding in Rome. Could he bear to let the pope arrive in his territory to be met by the deputy? By the time any visit happens, there will be a new Free Presbyterian Moderator: well-hidden yearnings towards true moderation might be free at last.