Late last October, just before the November election, conservative wordsmith Peggy Noonan penned a column for The Wall Street Journal that spooked a few of us.

The column, “A Separate Peace,” posited the belief that “in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon.” She even confided that pollsters like me couldn’t capture her angst with the formulaic “right direction or wrong track” question.

Noonan’s intuition was that elites of journalism and politics know something’s terribly wrong in America but aren’t doing anything about it. Instead, they stand by idly while “wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks.”

I started getting e-mailed copies of this column from various sources. It was reminiscent of the good ol’ days when I’d receive multiple e-mails with attached copies of the latest Bill Clinton joke or Monica exposé. But last October’s e-mail wasn’t exuberant or even mad. My correspondents just sounded scared. They sensed that if iron-willed Peggy is bummed out, aren’t we all doomed?

Some sought my opinion — “Is she right?” Others assumed the truth of Noonan’s complaint and merely asked about the political impact of the phenomena Noonan described. “Won’t sentiment like that hurt us in pivotal elections like Virginia’s?”

Frankly, I didn’t know what to think at the time, but after reading Peggy Noonan’s latest book, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father, I have at least a hypothesis about what’s going on in this conservative’s cerebrum.

This informative “biography” of John Paul is more accurately a spiritual autobiography of Ms. Noonan herself. In the tradition of William Buckley’s Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, Noonan’s soliloquies recount her steps along a path to what Evangelical Christians like myself would refer to as “sanctification.”

My hypothesis is that Peggy Noonan is coming to several conclusions, the most important being that God is ultimately in charge of things and that strong leaders, even ones as great as Ronald Reagan and John Paul, cannot always make right from wrong.

Though she clearly idealized the last Holy Father and systematically admired most everything he did during his long career, she clearly can’t quite reconcile his nonaggressive stance on the church’s sex scandals. Her chapter on this episode is titled “The Great Shame.” Because Noonan saw someone as great as John Paul struggle to do right, she naturally worries about her own plight. When she reads that John Paul once said he’d soon have to “account” for his life, Noonan wonders, “If he is worried about his accounts, how worried should I be?”

It’s this worry that I think afflicts many Noonanesque Republicans on the road to sanctification. They have started worrying about issues such as our party’s heart for the working poor. It was easier when we were fighting Godless communism during Reagan’s Cold War reign, but now it’s getting tougher to be a consistently compassionate conservative. Just ask President Bush.

Peggy Noonan makes the interesting observation that John Paul was in Mass during most of the important milestones in his life. He was not meeting with important church officials. He was not writing important encyclicals. He was not even doing good deeds. He was worshipping.

For someone like Noonan, this raises the question of what she will be doing when she’s called to account. This is the question that changes everything. You sometimes realize what a mess everything is, and you want to try to make everything better.

Hill is director of Hill Research Consultants, a Texas-based firm that has polled for GOP candidates and causes since 1988.