Pope Bashing.
Scorpi...@attnospam.net
the decisions that the Pope made or supported. Nothing wrong with
that.
What I don't understand is why some here chose to use the even of the
Pope's death to malign and condemn him.
No matter my disillusionment with the catholic church, I can see that
Pope John Paul II was a basically good man with good intentions. The
fact that I don't agree with all of them doesn't negate that he was a
good person.
Those of you who just can't control yourselves and feel you must mock
this man at the time of his death have are behaving like hypocritical
cowards. Some of you I have had a great deal of respect for, others
are of little surprise to me.
The Pope was a good man with some ideas that we didn't agree with.
That's all. He wasn't a child molester, a killer, or anything like
that.
--
Scorp
Bradley K. Sherman
<scorpi...@attNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>I can understand and even respect that people had issues with some of
>the decisions that the Pope made or supported. Nothing wrong with
>that.
>
>What I don't understand is why some here chose to use the even of the
>Pope's death to malign and condemn him.
>
>No matter my disillusionment with the catholic church, I can see that
>Pope John Paul II was a basically good man with good intentions. The
>fact that I don't agree with all of them doesn't negate that he was a
>good person.
What did he do that was good? Apparently he was a closet facist:
<http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro04082005.html>
--bks
Scorpi...@attnospam.net
Off the top of my head, he tried to get Bush to get out of Iraq. One
of many things.
--
Scorp
Bradley K. Sherman
<scorpi...@attNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>On Fri, 8 Apr 2005 21:36:40 +0000 (UTC), b...@panix.com (Bradley K.
>Sherman) wrote:
>
>>In article <a0td51druj1qcknt7...@4ax.com>,
>> <scorpi...@attNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>>>I can understand and even respect that people had issues with some
>of
>>>the decisions that the Pope made or supported. Nothing wrong with
>>>that.
>>>
>>>What I don't understand is why some here chose to use the even of
>the
>>>Pope's death to malign and condemn him.
>>>
>>>No matter my disillusionment with the catholic church, I can see
>that
>>>Pope John Paul II was a basically good man with good intentions.
>The
>>>fact that I don't agree with all of them doesn't negate that he was
>a
>>>good person.
>>
>>
>> <http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro04082005.html>
>>
>> --bks
>
>Off the top of my head, he tried to get Bush to get out of Iraq. One
>of many things.
How hard? I remember one statement. Pure lip service
--bks
G W Shrub
"Bradley K. Sherman" <b...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:d36th8$9id$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> What did he do that was good? Apparently he was a closet facist:
>
> <http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro04082005.html>
He was excessively anti-communist which led him to make some bad decisions.
His experience, however, was not with communism but with totalitarianism
disguised as communism.
--
GW
tiny dancer
<Scorpi...@attNOSPAM.net> wrote in message
news:4gvd5155fig5l1gpd...@4ax.com...
Yeah, but he also helped to protect the molesting priests, and hauled
Cardinal Law to the Vatican to protect him, didn't he?
td
none
> What I don't understand is why some here chose to use the even of the
> Pope's death to malign and condemn him.
Remember that was a man who wanted to force rape victims to carry their
rapists' babies to term. He had a lot of political influence and took
some very wacky, if bold, public positions, making him a natural magnet
for hate and vitriol.
> The Pope was a good man with some ideas that we didn't agree with.
> That's all.
I don't think his motives were evil, but under his leadership, the
Catholic church exercised its influence in ways that no reasonable
person can regard as constructive, helpful, or life-affirming.
-Mike
MrPepper11
emissaries to meet with George W. Bush - who basically told them to go
home.
Based on the pope's very public condemnation, some bishops in the U.S.
went so far as to declare that fighting against Iraqis was a mortal
sin.
John Paul II's personal integrity and natural talents were
unquestionable - as evidenced by today's funeral - and he has a
well-earned place in history. However, by his own admission, he was a
lousy church manager with a hands-off style (but he was completely
hands-on when it came to dissent and abortion). One needs look no
further than the American Catholics - most of them loved the man but
they routinely disregarded his teachings. The pedophilia and decline in
membership will continue as long as the church refuses to join the 21st
century. This is a certainty, since 95% of the voting cardinals are
handpicked conservative Neanderthals, and the current crop of Catholic
priests is a bunch of closet gays.
Kitty
don't matter---he was a human being
Kitty
MrPepper11
Pope John Paul II: Bad for the church but good for the world?
Paul Vallely studies the impact of a figure of paradox
08 April 2005
Reaction to the death of Pope John Paul II has been starkly polarised.
Awed enthusiasts have been unstinting in their praise. Critics have
been withering in their condemnation of his reactionary views,
particular in sexual matters. But many within the church have been
muted while the body of the Pope lay unburied.
Now that the funeral is over, and as the 116 cardinal electors begin
their secret discussions in the run up to the conclave to choose the
next pope, evaluations of the last Pope's 26-year ministry will attempt
to reach a more balanced picture. For from a considered verdict will
flow the analysis of what is needed in John Paul II's successor as the
Roman Catholic church's 265th pope.
In an age of democracy when few international leaders remain for long
in the public eye Pope John Paul II bestrode the world stage like a
colossus across four decades. The statistics piled up in recent days
have shown that by any standards he was an extraordinary figure. He was
the first non-Italian Pope for 456 years. He travelled almost a million
miles to 129 countries to visit the world's one billion Catholics. He
set 1,351 individuals on the road to sainthood - more than all the
other popes of the 20th century put together. He created 232 cardinals.
He was one of the most prolific popes, with encyclicals, letters,
sermons and speeches which fill nearly 150 volumes. He had a gift for
memorable gestures from kissing the soil on his first visit to a
country to inserting a prayer scroll into a crevice of Jerusalem's
Western Wall. His was the third-longest papacy in the 2,000 year
history of the Catholic Church.
His impact on the secular world was far-reaching. He played a key role
in the collapse of Communism, not just through his visits to his
homeland in 1979 and 1983 but also through his support for the Polish
independent trade union, Solidarity, which gave his countrymen a
vehicle for resistance. Though it was not known at the time, the Pope
wrote letters of support to activists imprisoned by the communists; and
after private meetings with the US President, Ronald Reagan, he
co-operated with the CIA in the supply of clandestine materials with
priests and bishops, who were immune from body searches, acting as
couriers.
But he touched world affairs far more widely. He had more than 1,475
meetings with Heads of State and Prime Ministers and sent envoys across
the globe on the eve of wars. Small wonder that many tributes have
described him as a "superpope".
Yet above all Pope John Paul II was a figure of paradox. A radical
voice on social issues he challenged much that the secular world deemed
as inevitable: the abysmal gap between the wealthy and the wretched of
the earth, the scandal of the international arms trade, the death
penalty, and the assumption that profit should take priority over
people in the "savage capitalism" of the new globalised economy.
But in other things he was indeed deeply reactionary. His staunch
defence of the Roman Catholic Church's hard line on the sanctity of
human life - "from conception to natural death" - led him to decry
abortions even for women raped in the Balkans wars, denounce the use of
condoms in Aids-ravaged Africa and condemn attempts to introduce family
planning despite a global population explosion.
The secular world never understood this man of contradictions. In part
that was because much of his work was kept as hidden as the bare little
third-floor room in which he lived for almost 30 years overlooking the
baroque splendour of St. Peter's basilica. As spare as any monk's it
contained a single bed, two straight-backed chairs, a desk and a floor
which, apart from a small carpet near the bed, was bare; its walls too
were unadorned apart from a few icons brought from Poland.
But from there Karol Wojtyla brought the long-term financial problems
of the Vatican under control, promulgated a new code of canon law for
the Catholic Church (supervised from his sick-bed while recovering from
an assassination attempt in 1981), and oversaw the creation of its
first new Catechism since the 16th century summarising all the
essential beliefs and moral tenets of the church. Any one of these
alone would have constituted an impressive legacy but John Paul II did
much else, including the establishment of new rules for the election of
his successor - making members of the College of Cardinals ineligible
once they reached the age of 80. (At present that means there are 117
cardinals who will elect the next pope).
But there were other reasons the last pope was hard for our secular age
to fathom - his Polishness, his profoundly pessimistic temperament, his
distrust of democracy and his moral certainty. But, perhaps most
perplexing was attitude of the Pope to the revolution the Church had
made with its Second Vatican Council. His words always paid lip service
to Vatican II's central aim of turning the Church towards the world
rather than away from it. But his actions, increasingly so in his later
years, seem intent on reversing many of the Council's changes.
In the 1960s, after 2000 years of talking to itself in Latin, the
Catholic Church had decided it must stop focusing inwards on its
sacramental life. Instead it was to embark on a strategy of "reading
the signs of the times" to discover where God's spirit was at work in
the wider world. As a bishop Karol Wojtyla had been part of that
movement. He had even helped draft the council's radical new
constitution Gaudium et Spes (The Church in the Modern World). But soon
after becoming Pope he evidently decided that progressive ideas and
practices had gone too far. A kind of post-conciliar drift had set in
which had to be arrested.
Those who, after Vatican II, had hoped for a less monarchical and more
collegial style of papacy were to be disappointed. Rome became more
centralised. The papal role was slowly shifted from being
first-among-equals with his brother bishops to one of absolute
autocrat. The power of national conferences of bishops was undermined.
Vatican II episcopal progressives were gradually replaced by bishops
whose conservatism often outstripped their pastoral ability. Nuns were
told to resume wearing their habit. Theologians were instructed to be
docile. The faithful were simply to pray, pay and obey.
He had a stated commitment to ecumenism - the idea of bringing together
Roman Catholics together with other Christians. Early in his
pontificate he became the first pope to travel to the UK where he met
Queen Elizabeth II, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and
in a dramatic symbolic gesture knelt in prayer in Canterbury Cathedral
with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. He gave higher
priority still to conciliatory gestures towards the Greek Orthodox
church so that the Church could once again "breathe with two lungs".
Even so the Pope clearly worried that too many concessions to ecumenism
were blunting the edges of Catholic identity. And so he repeatedly
stressed the things that separated Catholics from others: the Virgin
Mary - to whom he had a special devotion - birth control,
infallibility, the ban on communion between denominations, celibacy,
women priests and so on.
The result was a ministry of contradictions which stretched throughout
his reign. In search of rapprochement with the Orthodox he went to
Athens and issued an unprecedented apology for 1000 years of bad
relations - but then ruined the effect by insisting that they cannot be
called a 'sister church' since Rome has to be the mother. The result is
that good relations with the Orthodox are further away now than they
were when John Paul II was elected.
It was the same story with the Anglicans. He delighted them in 1995 by
asking other Christian denominations in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint how
the papal ministry could be exercised in ways more acceptable to them.
But then he cold-shouldered or disciplined Catholics who took up the
invitation and wrote on the subject and then in 1998 reiterated, with
no apparent provocation, Rome's ruling that Anglican priestly orders
are invalid.
There has been similar ambivalence towards other faiths. John Paul II
became the first pope in history to enter both a mosque and a
synagogue. He went to pray at the Western Wall and issued an apology
for Christian anti-semitism at the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. But
he irritated many Jews by blaming individuals rather than the teaching
of the Church for centuries of hatred and suspicion - and he annoyed
many more by supporting a Catholic convent at Auschwitz and beatifying
Pius IX, the pope who kidnapped a Jewish boy. With other faiths too he
has been equivocal, embracing the notion of inter-faith dialogue and
inviting the leaders of other religions to prayer gatherings at Assisi,
but then suppressing theologians working on it. It was a strategy which
drove away as many as it attracted.
Those who dared to disagree were branded dissenters. Many of the
church's leading thinkers - Hans Küng, Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff -
were stripped of their official positions or silenced. The techniques
used even led one troublesome theologian, Bernard Haring, to compare
the questioning he underwent at the Vatican to the treatment he once
received under Hitler. Liberation theologians were suppressed as
ungodly Marxists; one, Father Tissa Balasuriya, a priest from Sri Lanka
who had been engaged in dialogue with Hindus and Buddhists, was even
excommunicated. Clerics and theologians were bound to a "loyal assent",
as the gag was euphemistically called. Bishops, like the saintly Dom
Helder Camera in Brazil, who strayed from the papal line, were
systematically replaced.
Instead free reign was given to extremist right-wing movements like
Opus Dei which saw unquestioning loyalty to the Pope as their first
duty. (It was significant that the founder of Opus Dei, Josémaria
Escrivá, was fast-tracked to sainthood, where Oscar Romero, the martyr
of El Salvador, was totally overlooked, revealing how John Paul II's
record number of saints were chosen to fit his ideological worldview.)
All of this was underpinned by Karol Wojtyla's cultural background. He
grew up in Poland where the Church was persecuted first by the Nazis
and then by the Communists. A church always under attack developed a
cultural and spiritual laager mentality. That sense never left the
Polish pope. Even after the fall of communism, he continued to see the
Church as under siege - by secularism, materialism or relativism.
More than that, moving from Nazism, through Marxism, to the Vatican
meant he never lived outside a framework of dictatorial absolutism. He
never had any real experience of a pluralistic democratic society.
He tried to connect with the modern world, grounding his approach in
the worldview that had most appealed to him as a philosophy don - a
tradition of thinking called "personalism", a kind of Christian
existentialism which insists that it is through creative action that
human beings realise their potential. From this perspective he wrote
some 60 major documents. These sought to embrace the notion of human
rights (which the church had traditionally opposed) and create a
Christian alternative to the philosophies of the 20th century -
Marxism, humanism and post-modernism.
But Pope John Paul II could never overcome his suspicion of democracy.
He was a strong advocate of it when totalitarian communism was the
alternative. But its chief virtue for the Polish pope lay in the
greater evil it kept out. Once communism had fallen, the faults of
democracy were exposed. It might provide individuals with the freedom
to make choices but it has no mechanisms to direct them to chose what
is right. The will of the majority, he said, can enslave the truth.
This had implications inside the Church too. During the 20th century
Catholicism had moved away from giving its blessing to authoritarian
modes of government. Instead it had endorsed the participation of
ordinary people which democracy provides. A previous pope, Paul VI, had
begun to come round to the idea that Rome had to reconcile that with
the Church's own internal governance.
John Paul II squashed that notion. Democracy was OK for the people of
Communist Poland but inside the church it was a threat to papal
authority. Instead he returned to the old incongruities which
characterise the Church's idea of the good Catholic citizen. (When
looking at the secular world he or she is supposed to be adult, active,
well-informed, educated, critical of authority, sceptical, intolerant
of injustice, ready to participate and take responsibility. Yet when
faced with papal pronouncements he or she is expected suddenly to
become deferential, docile, obedient and infantile.)
Much of this grew out of the Pope's profoundly pessimistic temperament.
For all his embrace of the Christian virtue of hope, John Paul II was a
man of deep personal and historical pessimism who was not at home with
the mood of optimism, challenge and confidence which had characterised
the Second Vatican Council. His theological outlook was Augustinian, it
did not go in for fine distinctions but offered dramatic alternatives
and highly charged opposing poles. The Pope wrote, as one theologian
put it, "like Van Gogh paints: broad strokes, huge amounts of paint,
strong colours". Wojtyla's church was no place for grey or ambiguity.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the metaphor which he frequently used
towards the end of his life. The West, he said, was in the grip of "a
culture of death". It was there in everything: consumerism, personal
hedonism, sexual mores, medical ethics and the over-emphasis on
economic efficiency, personal freedom and maximum choice which
undergirds a lifestyle in which morality is down-played in all aspects
of life under democratic capitalism.
As so often, the Pope over-stated his case. But he also put his finger
on uncomfortable truths about the way we now live. He suggested that it
was the greed of the rich world which talks about a "population
explosion" and questions the right of the Third World poor to
reproduce. He insisted that in a society dominated by materialism "the
values of being are replaced by those of having"; people have become
slaves to things. He repeatedly suggested that moral and technological
developments are out of kilter. He warned of the danger of a liberal
democracy elevating freedom and choice to be the only virtue. He
cautioned against the interests of minorities becoming enslaved to the
will of the majority. He constantly reasserted that rationalism is, by
itself, not enough.
All these were messages unpalatable to the modern world. In
re-iterating them across four decades Pope John Paul II became a
contra-indicator to received wisdom of Western society and acted as a
moral compass for believers and non-believers alike.
As he grew older his views changed. Previously he had shied away from
an absolute condemnation of capital punishment, but later in life he
seemed to acknowledge that this was inconsistent with his views on the
sanctity of life; there were now no situations in modern life where the
death penalty could be justified, he eventually said. As the Millennium
Years of 2000 approached he became seized with the need for the Church
to repent of past sins and apologised, among other things, for the
Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo, the church's justification of
slavery, the mistreatment of indigenous persons, and the Crusades. But
in general, plagued by ill-health and dogged by speculation about his
resignation, he became more doctrinaire and unyielding - stretching the
idea of papal infallibility into unprecedented areas and attempting to
bind the hands of his successors over the church's opposition to women
priests.
In the early years his personal charisma and strong moral lead brought
many to suggest that Pope John Paul II was good for the church but bad
for the world. By the end of his long reign there were grounds for
concluding that the Polish pope may, in fact, have been quite the
opposite: bad for the church but good for the world. It may yet be some
time before history will offer a verdict.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Offshore Eddie
"MrPepper11" <MrPep...@go.com> wrote in message
news:1113006068.4...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
I respectfully disagree with the last clause of your last sentence. I was
raised in a Catholic household and I know some things about Catholic priests
that one doesn't normally read in the media. Chiefly, many are priests for only
a short time in their lives. I know of priests who went on to own auto
dealerships, be police officers, doctors, real estate agents. In fact, I recall
only a few priests who were lifers. Another thing about the Catholic church is
that money is more important than sex. Sex, of course, gets all the publicity,
but mammon is ... God ;-)
Aussie Lurker
Independent News (UK)
Pope John Paul II: Bad for the church but good for the world?
Paul Vallely studies the impact of a figure of paradox
08 April 2005
Thanks for posting a very interesting article. It seems that Pope John Paul
II was certainly a man of strong beliefs but also of contradictions.
Aussie Lurker
c stickney
wrote:
As a fellow Roman Catholic I've seen and heard of a lot of American
priests replaced by foreign priests. The ones from Ireland were ok,
but the ones from non English speaking countries were quite hard to
understand. The lack of American priests is a serious problem for the
church. It's been in the news for many, many years. A pastor I know
said the problem came from the bad publicity surrounding the child
molestation cases and the lifelong celibacy requirement which other
Christian churches don't have (Anglicans, Baptists, etc.). He also
said most priests would like for the church to change this policy and
give them a taste of the normal life.
Just an input.
Kathy
And vice versa. Our Polish-speaking priest always had the longest line
for confessions. He couldn't understand a thing we said.
Kathy
Chocolic
<Scorpi...@attNOSPAM.net> wrote in message
news:4gvd5155fig5l1gpd...@4ax.com...
I'm thinking you do the same thing with Bush. "He is basically a
good man with good intentions. The fact that 'you' don't agree with
all of them doesn't negate that he is a good person."
It's all in the eye of the beholder.
Chocolic