A brief summary Pope John Paedopaul II's legacy of agony:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12743996%5E2703,00.html
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1540040,00.html
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/04/03/for_next_pontiff_daunting_challenges_await/
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/opinion/200503/kt2005030817304854300.htm
(Written March 8)
http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13709189
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,12272,1451750,00.html
The full article is posted below, and I agree with everything
except for the last insulting sentence.
Quoth the Ministry song, "PSalm 69":
"Drinking the blood of jesus
Drinking it right from his veins
Learning to swim in the ocean
Learning to prowl in his name
The body of christ looked unto me
A preacher with god-given hands
He wants you to suck on the holy ghost
And swallow the sins of man
The invisible ***** of the holy ghost
Comes down like acid rain
They're making a bonnet of terminal guilt
The scavengers go on parade
The fathers who write that eternity
Is used to fight the sword
Have filled you up with the devil's *****
And he'll come in the name of the lord"
Truer words were never spoken.
Bob Dog
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Divine retribution is an idol threat.
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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12743996%5E2703,00.html
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A pontificate of trouble
[...]
Yet his pontificate was also assailed by an expanding
accumulation of woes: mass defections from belief,
plummeting attendance at mass, a collapsing priesthood
besmirched by pedophile scandals, the decline of Catholic
marriage, a rapid increase in Catholic divorce rates, and
conflicts involving a host of jurisdictional issues such as
aspirations for a female priesthood and local discretion in
the choice of bishops.
[...]
Despite the abiding affection of most of the 1billion
faithful towards the pope, John Paul II, by every
statistical record available, has left the Catholic church
in a far worse state than he found it.
[...]
There was also in crucial respects a lack of balance, a
striking intransigence. For all his shining qualities and
strong personality, his pontificate cast long and ominous
shadows into the new century and future pontificates, which
will be shaped and determined by his conservative choice of
bishops and cardinals. He preached love and forgiveness,
but he was an unyielding moral crusader whose hard sayings
marginalised huge segments of his church. He
uncompromisingly condemned homosexuality, divorce and even
safe sex in regions of the world ravaged by AIDS. Divorced
Catholics who remarried were barred from the sacraments.
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http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1540040,00.html
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A Pope of Unity but Also Division
While millions of people, not only Roman Catholics, mourned
for Pope John Paul II, many regarded his influential views
as out-of-date and damaging in the modern world.
The pope stuck by his convictions on a number of sensitive
subjects which brought him and his church into the firing
line of liberals and social groups. His far-reaching
influence, particularly in the developing world, has been
blamed for failing to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
He maintained throughout his papacy that the Roman Catholic
Church believed abstinence and fidelity within marriage, and
not condoms, were the best way to stop the spread of
HIV/AIDS, a message seen by health organizations in
particular as an irresponsible one.
[...]
There were even reports that the church was sending out
messages in Africa that condoms actually caused HIV/AIDS.
[...]
"He will go down in history as a pope who didn't understand
and who wasn't friendly to women," Frances Kissling,
president of the liberal Washington D.C.-based activist
group Catholics for a Free Choice, said of John Paul in a
statement. "He couldn't have slammed the door shut more
loudly on the question of the ordination of women. He will
go down as a fifth-century pope in terms of who women are."
[...]
The Vatican was rounded on by women in 2004 for issuing a
long-awaited document on men and women that charged that
feminists were "adversaries of men" who undermined families
and paved the way for acceptance of gay marriage.
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http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/04/03/for_next_pontiff_daunting_challenges_await/
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For next pontiff, daunting challenges await
[...]
When the 117 voting-age cardinals gather to elect the next
pope two weeks from John Paul II's death yesterday, they
will invoke centuries-old rituals of transition to choose
the head of the billion-member church. But that new pope
will face a dizzying array of modern-day challenges,
internal as well as external, and with little consensus
from church leaders about their top priorities.
In Europe, the Catholic hierarchy is threatened by an
advancing secular culture and a dramatic surge of Muslim
immigrants who are building mosques across the continent.
In Africa, the church faces the twin scourges of AIDS and
poverty; in Latin America, it copes with the steady
migration of parts of a traditionally Catholic population
toward evangelical Protestantism.
And in the United States, the church is still reeling from
the clergy sexual abuse crisis and grappling with a
fast-changing set of moral questions provoked by advances
in medicine and genetics.
[...]
Twelve nations in Europe have legalized gay marriage or
some form of same-sex union, despite the fact that the
pope referred to it as part of the "ideology of evil."
The Vatican lost its battle to have the new, proposed
constitution of the European Union include a reference to
"God."
This presents the church with a choice: Does it confront
the problem by being more modern and engaging in dialogue
with a secular Europe, or does it retrench into a culture
of conviction and hold fast to its conservative beliefs
and work to preserve what one Vatican official called the
"imperiled Christian identity of Europe."
[...]
For others, the most important looming issue lies on the
cutting edge between science and morality. The Rev. Brian
Johnstone, a professor at Alfonsiana Academy of Moral
Theology in Rome, said, "Over the 26 years of this papacy,
the pace of developments in medicine and genetics have been
dizzying, and the church will need to do more to keep up. A
lot of these issues will be in the public forum and the
church must deepen its understanding of these issues."
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http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/opinion/200503/kt2005030817304854300.htm
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John Paul II's Legacy and Failings
[...]
But his success is not without controversy. As polemic as
dynamic, his narrow-minded faith will tarnish his legacy.
Like the worldly Renaissance Popes before him, he failed to
revive the church from within. His stubborn edicts on
doctrine bordered the absurd. On matters of sexual
morality, the rights of women, the prerogatives of an
all-male, celibate priesthood, religious pluralism, and the
dictatorial authority of church hierarchy, he has been
downright reactionary.
He attempted to turn back reforms begun by Vatican II. He
condemned condoms even to slow the spread of AIDS. He
protected a clerical system of centralized church power
over the welfare of children. Worst of all for his
unenviable successor, he may have entrenched the church so
out of step with every advanced liberal society in the
world that it is perhaps beyond reform. Though he extended
the political reach of the Vatican, he made Catholic faith
incomprehensible.
Be that as it may, John Paul II has appointed almost
everyone in the College of Cardinals. His ideas will
likely carry on after him.
[...]
Sure, it is in the nature of Popes to be authoritarian.
After all, we are talking about one of the most
dictatorial, conservative organizations on the planet _
the Vatican, where its leader literally is "infallible."
But even by those standards, this Pope has been
particularly domineering and intolerant, not just of
dissent but also of any opinions other than his own.
Now the church is embroiled in entirely unnecessary rows
with other denominations over arcane matters, as whether
they can be properly regarded as "Christian." And it
issues loutish injunctions, as calling gays "evil" and
against girls singing in church choirs.
In his most recent publication (though in his present
infirmed condition, the book's authorship is dubious at
best), ``Memory and Identity: Conversations Between
Millenniums,'' the Pope is now wax indignant on democracy
and ``God's law.'' But in it, he seems just spiritually
callous and undemocratic.
In this controversial new book, John Paul II states that
the Holocaust and abortion are morally equivalent and came
about when majorities tried to usurp "the law of God."
Elsewhere in it, he implicates democracy for Hitler and
the Nazis. "It was a legally elected parliament which
allowed for the election of Hitler (and) the same
Reichstag that gave Hitler powers which paved a way for
the political invasion of Europe and to the creation of
concentration camps."
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http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13709189
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Pope's ingrained views on women
[...]
Joanna Manning, co-founder of Catholic Organizations for
Renewal, for her part criticized the late pope for trying
to re-establish humility and subordination as the
traditional virtues of women.
"He introduced a whole new doctrine of femininity into the
Church where women's role in Christianity was to be that of
the Virgin Mary rather than Christ, which not only is a
travesty of theology but it's also quite dangerous in the
effects it can have on women's lives," Manning told CBC
television in Canada.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,12272,1451750,00.html
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The Pope has blood on his hands
John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory
60s were declining into the long political night of Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of
the early 70s began to bite, the western world made a
decisive shift to the right, and the transformation of an
obscure Polish bishop from Karol Wojtyla to John Paul II
was part of this wider transition. The Catholic church had
lived through its own brand of flower power in the 60s,
known as the Second Vatican Council; and the time was now
ripe to rein in leftist monks, clap-happy nuns and Latin
American Catholic Marxists. All of this had been set in
train by a pope - John XIII - whom the Catholic
conservatives regarded as at best wacky and at worst a
Soviet agent.
What was needed for this task was someone well-trained in
the techniques of the cold war. As a prelate from Poland,
Wojtyla hailed from what was probably the most reactionary
national outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin
Mary-worship, nationalist fervour and ferocious
anti-communism. Years of dealing with the Polish communists
had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate
political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church
into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish
from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Both institutions were
closed, dogmatic, censorious and hierarchical, awash with
myth and personality cults. It was just that, like many
alter egos, they also happened to be deadly enemies, locked
in lethal combat over the soul of the Polish people.
Aware of how little they had won from dialogue with the
Polish regime, the bishops were ill-inclined to bend a
Rowan-Williams-like ear to both sides of the theological
conflict that was raging within the universal church. On a
visit to the Vatican before he became Pope, the
authoritarian Wojtyla was horrified at the sight of
bickering theologians. This was not the way they did things
in Warsaw. The conservative wing of the Vatican, which had
detested the Vatican Council from the outset and done its
utmost to derail it, thus looked to the Poles for salvation.
When the throne of Peter fell empty, the conservatives
managed to swallow their aversion to a non-Italian pontiff
and elected one for the first time since 1522.
Once ensconced in power, John Paul II set about rolling
back the liberal achievements of Vatican 2. Prominent
liberal theologians were summoned to his throne for a
dressing down. One of his prime aims was to restore to
papal hands the power that had been decentralised to the
local churches. In the early church, laymen and women
elected their own bishops. Vatican 2 didn't go as far as
that, but it insisted on the doctrine of collegiality -
that the Pope was not to be seen as capo di tutti capi,
but as first among equals.
John Paul, however, acknowledged equality with nobody.
From his early years as a priest, he was notable for his
exorbitant belief in his own spiritual and intellectual
powers. Graham Greene once dreamed of a newspaper headline
reading "John Paul canonises Jesus Christ". Bishops were
summoned to Rome to be given their orders, not for
fraternal consultation. Loopy far-right mystics and
Francoists were honoured, and Latin American political
liberationists bawled out. The Pope's authority was so
unassailable that the head of a Spanish seminary managed to
convince his students that he had the Pope's personal
permission to masturbate them.
The result of centring all power in Rome was an
infantilisation of the local churches. Clergy found
themselves incapable of taking initiatives without nervous
glances over their shoulders at the Holy Office. It was at
just this point, when the local churches were least capable
of handling a crisis maturely, that the child sex abuse
scandal broke. John Paul's response was to reward an
American cardinal who had assiduously covered up the
outrage with a plush posting in Rome.
The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was neither his
part in this cover up nor his neanderthal attitude to women.
It was the grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned -
as a "culture of death" - condoms, which might have saved
countless Catholics in the developing world from an
agonising Aids death. The Pope goes to his eternal reward
with those deaths on his hands. He was one of the greatest
disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin.
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