| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"666" |
| Date: |
03 Apr 2005 05:59:19 AM |
| Object: |
The Church Loses Its Light |
Washington Post
April 3, 2005
The Church Loses Its Light
In John Paul II, World Found a Direct, Dynamic Leader
By J.Y. Smith
Special to The Washington Post
Pope John Paul II, who died this evening at the age of 84, was an
obscure Polish prelate who became the supreme pontiff of the Roman
Catholic Church, a statesman who helped bring down Eastern European
communism, and a defender of the faith who insisted that the church
confront the sins of its past to prepare it for the third millennium.
When John Paul was elected the 263rd successor to Saint Peter on Oct.
16, 1978, at age 58, he was the youngest pope in 132 years, the first
Polish pope and the first non-Italian pope in 4 1/2 centuries.
The former Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow, the ancient
capital of his native Poland, quickly declared a "new evangelization"
and began an extraordinary series of journeys that made him one of the
most familiar figures in the world.
His destinations included the United Nations in New York, remote
islands in the farthest reaches of the Pacific, the Mall in Washington
and the Lutheran strongholds of northern Scandinavia. He visited the
barrios of Latin America, the rice fields of Southeast Asia and the
plains of the Indian subcontinent. He made more than a dozen trips to
Africa.
His messages were that faith must be grounded in truth and that the key
to freedom is love and service to God. His themes were peace, justice
and the sanctity of life. He warned that a spreading "culture of
death," in forms ranging from genocide and "ethnic cleansing" to
abortion, euthanasia and the frenzied pursuit of material goods, was
leading to a "blunting of the moral sensitivity of people's
consciences."
His defense of traditional church dogma on sex and gender issues proved
controversial in the developed world, where it tended to overshadow
other church issues.
John Paul brought a global outlook to an organization that had been
Eurocentric throughout its history. He took unprecedented steps toward
opening dialogues with other religions. He spoke frequently and
forcefully on political questions. He was a scourge of communism but
also a critic of capitalism and its treatment of the poor.
With the passage of years, his insistence that the Roman Catholic
Church atone for the Inquisition, the bloody hunt for heretics that
began in the 13th century, and for other sins committed in its name
became a dominant concern. Despite reported opposition from many high
church officials, John Paul held that while the church itself is holy,
and therefore infallible, its servants are human and sometimes stray
from the teachings of Jesus.
In March 2000, he issued an unprecedented apology for the mistakes
committed by the church throughout its history. Saying "we humbly ask
forgiveness," John Paul said Catholics needed to undergo a
"purification of memory" of past errors as the only way to prepare for
the future.
Nowhere was this aspect of his papacy more evident than in his
relations with Jews and Judaism. In 1986, he became the first pope to
visit a synagogue and prayed with Rome's chief rabbi. In 1994, he
directed the Vatican to establish full diplomatic relations with
Israel. In 1999, he ordered the Vatican to issue a document that it
described as an "act of repentance" for the church's failure to deter
the Nazi genocide against Jews in World War II.
The process of reconciliation reached a dramatic climax during the
pope's visit to the Holy Land in March 2000. At Yad Vashem, Israel's
monument to Holocaust victims, he declared: "I assure the Jewish people
that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love
and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred,
acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the
Jews by Christians at any time, and in any place."
Missing from the statement was an acknowledgment, sought by some Jews,
of Pope Pius XII's silence in the face of the Holocaust.
In Jerusalem, John Paul prayed at the Western Wall, one of the most
sacred sites in Judaism, and visited the Dome of the Rock and the
al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. He visited a
Palestinian refugee camp and said Palestinians have a "natural right"
to a homeland.
Dynamic Despite Ills
John Paul was an indomitable figure despite increasing infirmities. He
never fully recovered from wounds he suffered at the hands of a
would-be assassin in 1981. In 1992, doctors removed a benign intestinal
tumor. The following year, he underwent surgery for repair of a
dislocated shoulder, and in 1994 surgeons replaced a broken hip. With
the advance of years, he suffered from severe arthritis and had
difficulty walking. His left hand developed a tremble, the result of
Parkinson's disease.
Recently, speculation had mounted that John Paul's failing health might
force him to resign, though he repeatedly said he would not. On a visit
to Bulgaria and Azerbaijan in May 2002, he was unable to walk
unassisted and delivered his messages in a wavering and sometimes
inaudible voice. In September 2003, he was forced to cancel appearances
at the Vatican, and two cardinals publicly expressed alarm about his
failing health.
John Paul was an intellectual, a pragmatist, a scholar who held degrees
in theology and philosophy, and an essayist, poet and playwright. A
linguist, he spoke eight languages, including Latin. He was a defender
of liberty who had experienced oppression at the hands of Nazis and
communists. He was a mountaineer who loved hiking and skiing.
An actor in his student days, he brought to his exalted position a keen
sense of pageantry and a sure understanding of the reach and power of
television and radio. The news media adored him. When Time named him
"Man of the Year" for 1994, it was the 12th time he had appeared on the
magazine's cover in 16 years.
Appeal Transcends Church
He was enormously popular with ordinary people, whether Catholic or
not. In the early 1990s, a compact disc on which he recited the Rosary
in Latin against a background of music by Bach and Handel rose to the
top of the charts in Europe. John Paul souvenirs -- coffee cups,
plates, T-shirts and photographs -- sold by the millions wherever he
went.
He was famous for his smile and the warmth of his personality, and on
his travels he routinely drew mammoth crowds. An estimated 175,000
people turned out for a Mass he celebrated on the Mall in Washington in
October 1979; on a visit to Poland in 1999, a million people stood on a
muddy field in Krakow waiting to hear him say Mass in a pouring rain,
but illness prevented him from appearing.
He was said to have been seen by more people than anyone else in
history.
The example of his life added to his appeal. This was demonstrated when
he prayed for Mehmet Ali Agca, a 23-year-old Turk who had gone to Rome
by way of Bulgaria and shot him in a failed assassination attempt on
May 13, 1981. The attack occurred as the pope was standing in the back
of a jeep being driven through a crowd of worshipers in St. Peter's
Square. Gravely wounded in the abdomen by pistol shots fired at a range
of 20 feet, John Paul was rushed to the Agostino Gemelli hospital,
where he underwent surgery.
In July 1981, Agca was sentenced to life in prison. Later, he sought to
implicate others in the attack, and in 1984 three Bulgarians and five
Turks went on trial in Rome. Although a second trial in 1986 yielded no
conspiracy convictions, questions persisted about whether Agca acted
alone. On Dec. 27, 1983, John Paul visited Agca in his prison cell to
forgive him in person, and the two sat face-to-face for 20 minutes.
After 19 years in jail in Italy, Agca was pardoned in 2000 and returned
to Turkey, where he is serving a sentence for the murder of a
journalist.
In matters of faith and morals, John Paul was guided by the church's
core teaching that God made humankind in his own image and that the
right to life is fundamental and universal. In the encyclical
Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), published in 1995, he declared:
"Man's life comes from God; it is his gift, his image and imprint, a
sharing in his breath of life. God therefore is the sole Lord of this
life: man cannot do with it as he wills."
The same perspective informed his special interest in the welfare of
families, his opposition to divorce and his teachings on sex. In his
book "Love and Responsibility," the pontiff said, "Sexual intercourse
between husband and wife has the value of love only when neither of
them deliberately excludes the possibility of procreation." He held
that artificial contraception subverted this principle and demeaned
women.
John Paul refused to alter the general prohibition against priests
marrying, or the prohibition against ordaining women. He reminded the
faithful that the church deems homosexual behavior a sin. In addition,
he safeguarded the pope's prerogatives as the ultimate power in the
church, refusing to grant a larger role to the bishops, the clergy or
the laity.
These doctrines were prominent in disputes that have racked the
Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Critics
charged that by sticking to them, the pope was distancing himself and
the church from modern reality.
Church membership passed 1 billion by the end of the 1990s, with much
of the growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But in Europe and
North America, millions of the faithful turned to "cafeteria
Catholicism," picking and choosing which parts of dogma they would
obey, or left the church entirely.
In 2002, many American Catholic parishioners became upset by what they
saw as a weak response from the Vatican as scandals involving sexual
misconduct by priests swept the U.S. church. In April of that year,
John Paul summoned a dozen U.S. cardinals to a special Vatican summit,
where he said, "People need to know that there is no place in the
priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young." But
critics in the United States said his response should have been more
prompt and more forceful.
For John Paul, worldly dispute was nothing compared with the duty to
obey God's word. In a homily that could serve as a summary of his
stewardship, he said: "I am not severe -- I am sweet by nature -- but I
defend the rigidity principle. God is stronger than human weakness and
deviations. God will always have the last word."
In the encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), published
in 1993, he spelled out sharp limits on dissent:
"While exchanges and conflicts of opinion may constitute normal
expressions of public life in a representative democracy, moral
teaching certainly cannot depend simply upon respect for a process. . .
.. Opposition to the teaching of the Church's Pastors cannot be seen as
a legitimate expression either of Christian freedom or of the diversity
of the Spirit's gifts."
This thinking often contributed to prickly relations with the U.S.
church hierarchy. The Vatican disciplined Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen
of Seattle for perceived doctrinal missteps. Partly as a result, the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops insisted on new guidelines to
govern relations with the Holy See. In 1986, Bishop James Malone of
Youngstown, Ohio, the outgoing president of the conference, noted "a
growing and dangerous disaffection" between the Vatican and the U.S.
church.
Among theologians who experienced John Paul's wrath was the Rev.
Charles E. Curran of Catholic University in Washington. In 1986, he
lost his teaching license for asserting that a person could "dissent in
theory and practice" from the condemnation of artificial contraception
and still be a loyal Roman Catholic. The action against him was a
"definitive judgment" that had specific papal approval.
Practicality vs. Principle
John Paul was fascinated by science. In contrast to the church's
traditional wary approach to the subject, he established a Pontifical
Academy of Sciences, a body made up of eminent scholars, Catholics and
non-Catholics, to advise him on developments in the field. He also
commemorated the 100th birthday of Albert Einstein and directed that
Galileo, imprisoned by the Inquisition in 1633 for asserting the truth
of Copernicus's theory that the Earth circles the sun, be fully
rehabilitated.
In October 1996, he declared that physical evolution is "more than just
a theory," advancing the church's view, held for a half-century, that
the process was worthy of discussion but still open to question.
At the same time, he deplored the Enlightenment, the 18th-century
movement that gave the Western world many of its scientific, economic
and humanitarian glories. Its triumphs included the Industrial
Revolution and the propositions embodied in the Constitution of the
United States. But its central idea was that the human being, not God,
is the center of the universe. This struck at the heart of Catholic
dogma.
In "Crossing the Threshold of Hope," a book of reflections that became
a bestseller in 1994, John Paul traced these developments to Rene
Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician. His
dictum, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), countered the
teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the landmark theologian who said
being was a gift from God that preceded every human activity, including
thought.
John Paul spoke repeatedly and movingly against the modern tendency to
make profit and efficiency the measures of success. He blamed this
trend for the alienation of individuals, the disintegration of the
family and the abandonment of objective standards of behavior in modern
society. In 1993, he used the occasion of a World Youth Day gathering
in Cherry Creek State Park near Denver, one of a series of biennial
events he began in 1986, to summarize his thoughts on the "culture of
death":
"In a technological culture in which people are used to dominating
matter, discovering its laws and mechanisms in order to transform it
according to their wishes, the danger arises of also wanting to
manipulate conscience and its demands. In a culture which holds that no
universally valid truths are possible, nothing is absolute. . . . Good
comes to mean what is pleasing or useful at a particular moment. Evil
means what contradicts our subjective wishes. Each person can build a
private system of values."
At a Mass the next day, he cut short a homily that said, in its widely
quoted prepared text: "In our own century, as at no other time in
history, the 'culture of death' has assumed a social and institutional
form of legality to justify the most horrible crimes against humanity:
genocide, 'final solutions,' 'ethnic cleansings' and the massive
'taking of lives of human beings even before they are born or before
they reach the natural point of death.' "
Religious Rapprochement
John Paul made novel and far-reaching gestures toward establishing
closer ties with many faiths, not just Judaism. In 1986, he organized a
prayer-for-peace meeting at the shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi to
which he invited non-Christian leaders as well as Christians. Among
those attending were the Dalai Lama, the archbishop of Canterbury and
Mother Teresa.
In 2001, during a visit to Syria as part of a pilgrimage retracing the
journey of Saint Paul, he became the first pope to enter a mosque.
But John Paul was unable to realize one of his most cherished goals,
that of reconciling with the Eastern Orthodox Church, which split with
Rome in 1054. He was able to visit the predominantly Orthodox countries
of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Greece, but was not allowed into
Russia.
Recognizing that more than half of the world's Catholics now live in
developing countries, he transformed the church's leadership, greatly
reducing representation from Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe.
In 1994, after he made appointments to bring the voting strength of the
College of Cardinals, the body that will select his successor, to 120,
60 percent of the members were from Africa, Asia, Latin America,
Eastern Europe or the United States.
By October 2003, John Paul had named all but three of the 117 cardinals
eligible to vote in a conclave on his succession.
John Paul presided over 482 canonizations and 1,338 beatifications,
more than all in the preceding 400 years. Many of those chosen for
elevation were from developing countries.
A Political Papacy
In the realm of politics, John Paul opposed the U.S.-led wars against
Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the
Kosovo crisis in 1999. He called for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba
and U.N. sanctions against Iraq, and he declared that the rich nations
should forgive the debts of the developing world.
His proclivity for politics grew out of his personal experience. As a
priest and bishop in Poland, he conducted a more or less continuous
political dialogue with the communist government, which was imposed on
the country by the Soviet Union after it drove the Germans out late in
World War II. He met with every U.S. president from Jimmy Carter to
George W. Bush.
Many people regarded his support for the Solidarity trade union
movement in Poland in the 1980s as a crucial factor in that country's
peaceful transition to democracy and the subsequent collapse of
communism in the Soviet Union and its former satellites. "All that has
happened in Eastern Europe over these last few years would have been
impossible without the presence of this pope and without the important
role . . . that he played on the world stage," Mikhail Gorbachev, the
last president of the Soviet Union, declared in 1992 in an article in
the Italian newspaper La Stampa.
John Paul's election as head of the world's oldest international
organization was itself a significant development in the politics of
the Cold War. Communist leaders in Warsaw and Moscow could not ignore
his enormous influence among the Polish people, to whom the Catholic
Church is an inseparable part of the national identity.
In "His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time,"
published in 1996, Carl Bernstein, who gained fame for his work for The
Washington Post uncovering the Watergate scandal, and Italian
journalist Marco Politi argued that the pope and President Ronald
Reagan in effect planned the demise of Eastern European communism
during their first meeting in 1982, and that the pontiff and the United
States exchanged intelligence information.
Robert M. Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
said in a comment on the book that although the Vatican and the White
House had similar goals, he believed they worked along parallel tracks
"that did not intersect." He added that he was unaware of any
information the Vatican supplied to the CIA.
In "Witness to Hope," a noted biography of the pope, author George
Weigel said John Paul believed that culture, rather than politics or
economics, was the engine that drove history. It was clear from the
beginning of his papacy that he had a particular interest in bringing
Eastern Europe back to its Christian traditions. In his first visit to
Poland as pontiff in June 1979, he said:
"After so many centuries, the Slav peoples have heard the Apostle of
Jesus Christ speaking in their own tongue. And the first Slav pope in
the history of the church cannot fail to hear those closely related
Slav languages, although they may still sound strange to ears
accustomed to the Romance, Germanic, English and Celtic tongues. Is it
not Christ's will that this pope should manifest at this precise moment
the spiritual unity of Europe?"
Throughout the 1980s, John Paul was an observer-participant and
mediator-partisan in Polish developments. The decade began in a turmoil
of strikes and protests. In September 1980, shipyard workers in Gdansk
formed the Solidarity trade union under the leadership of Lech Walesa.
In December 1981, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the strongman of the Warsaw
government, declared martial law and jailed most of Solidarity's
leaders, including Walesa.
John Paul announced that the church was "on the side of the workers." A
few weeks later, he told worshipers in St. Peter's Square that respect
for civil rights in Poland and the country's independence were
necessary conditions of world peace.
"My land is bathed with the blood and sweat of its sons and daughters,"
he cried. "I put this problem before the conscience of the whole
world."
Impassioned though these words were, the pontiff's chief role was that
of moderator. The problem for all parties -- the church, the government
and the Solidarity leadership -- was twofold. First, they wanted to
keep the situation sufficiently calm that the Soviet Union would not
intervene militarily. Second, they wanted to move toward reform quickly
enough to avoid civil unrest among ordinary Poles, as occurred in 1970
with the loss of scores of lives at the hands of police and security
forces.
In 1983, during his second pastoral visit to Poland, John Paul met with
Jaruzelski and Walesa. In 1986, he concurred in a plan to establish a
government-church commission. In 1987, the Polish general called on the
pope in the Vatican and told him that communism was doomed in Poland
and that the problem had become one of handing over power peacefully to
a successor system.
Jaruzelski also acted as an intermediary in putting the pope in touch
with Gorbachev, the reforming Soviet president and Communist Party
leader.
In 1987, Gorbachev moved away from the Brezhnev Doctrine, under which
Moscow reserved the right to intervene militarily in its satellites.
The next year, his government said the traditional communist policy of
suppressing religion had been abandoned and it sponsored a ceremony in
Moscow to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of
Christianity to Russia.
John Paul responded by sending two delegations -- one to the religious
observance and the other, headed by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the
Vatican secretary of state, to the Soviet government. Casaroli carried
a letter to Gorbachev in which the pope expressed his hopes for
religious freedom in Russia and increased diplomatic contacts.
In January 1989, a ban on Solidarity was lifted, and in August that
year, after free elections, more than 40 years of communist rule in
Poland came to an end. That December, Gorbachev became the first Soviet
Communist Party chief to call on the pontiff. In 1990, the Vatican and
Moscow established formal diplomatic relations.
Although John Paul paid special attention to Eastern Europe, his
interests were global. In Latin America, he helped defuse a dispute
between Argentina and Peru. In Chile, he pressured Gen. Augusto
Pinochet, head of the military government, to hold free elections.
In the Philippines, he directed church officials to support Corazon
Aquino, a factor in ending the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. In
Africa, he sought to end religious and ethnic violence in Sudan and
Rwanda. He refused to visit South Africa until it had ended its racist
policies of apartheid.
After Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he sought a more
active role for the church in the changed conditions of the Middle
East. In addition to establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, he
met with Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Training and Trials
Karol Josef Wojtyla was born May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, an industrial
town near Krakow in the shadow of the Tatra Mountains in southern
Poland. His father, after whom he was named, was a noncommissioned
officer in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- which included
his region of Poland until the end of World War I -- and then in the
Polish army. His mother, Emilia Kaczorowska, died when he was a child.
His older brother, Edmund, a medical student, died of scarlet fever he
contracted from a patient.
In 1938, the Wojtylas, father and son, moved to Krakow. The future pope
enrolled in Jagiellonian University, where he studied philosophy and
joined the Rhapsodic Theater. He also wrote poetry and a number of
plays on religious themes. Because he was a student, Wojtyla was
exempted from military service when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on
Sept. 1, 1939, starting World War II in Europe.
One of the first acts of the Nazi occupation authorities in Krakow was
to close the university. They also began deporting able-bodied men for
work in Germany. To avoid this, Wojtyla got a job as a laborer in a
quarry supplying a chemical plant. Because it was war work, he got a
special identity card that exempted him from the occupiers' dragnets.
His studies continued underground, as did his work with the theater. He
also kept up his numerous church activities. In 1940, while attending a
prayer group, he met a tailor named Jan Tyranowski, who was to have a
profound influence on his decision to join the priesthood. Tyranowski
was a student of Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila, the
Spanish mystics who founded the Discalced Carmelites, and he encouraged
a sense of mysticism he found in Wojtyla.
In 1942, Wojtyla began studying for the priesthood. Because of
strictures imposed by the occupation, this activity was carried on in
secret in the residence of Prince Adam Stefan Sapieha, the archbishop
of Krakow and Wojtyla's sponsor in the church.
On Aug. 1, 1944, the Warsaw uprising against Nazi rule began. Fearing a
similar outbreak in Krakow, the Nazis there began a roundup that netted
an estimated 8,000 men and boys. Wojtyla escaped -- the Germans who
searched the house where he was staying failed to look in the basement
room where he was praying. He soon moved to the relative safety of the
archbishop's residence, where he lived in secret.
Wojtyla was ordained Nov. 1, 1946. He was sent to Angelicum University
in Rome, where he wrote his thesis on Saint John of the Cross and
received a doctorate in philosophy.
He also earned a doctorate in theology at Jagiellonian University. When
he returned to Poland in 1948, he became a deacon in the village of
Niegowic and, the following year, assistant pastor of St. Florian's
Church in Krakow.
In 1953, he defended his thesis on the phenomenology of Max Scheler, a
German philosopher, and was appointed a philosophy professor at a
seminary in Krakow. The next year, he joined the faculty of Catholic
University in Lublin.
In 1958, he was named auxiliary bishop of Krakow, and in 1964, when the
communist government lifted a ban on such appointments, he was promoted
to archbishop. In 1967, Pope Paul VI made him a member of the College
of Cardinals. On Sept. 28, 1978, Pope John Paul I, the former Cardinal
Albino Luciani, died of a heart attack after serving only 34 days. Six
days later, Wojtyla left Poland to join his fellow cardinals in Rome to
choose a successor.
On Oct. 16, after three days of deliberation in the Vatican's Sistine
Chapel and eight ballots, Wojtyla was elected the supreme pontiff. "It
is God's will," he declared when the vote was announced. "I accept."
.
|
|
| User: "Denis Loubet" |
|
| Title: Re: The Church Loses Its Light |
03 Apr 2005 03:16:17 PM |
|
|
"666" <son0fam@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1112507959.922601.37670@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Washington Post
April 3, 2005
The Church Loses Its Light
They'll just screw another one in.
--
Denis Loubet
dloubet@io.com
http://www.io.com/~dloubet
.
|
|
|
| User: "Attila" |
|
| Title: Re: The Church Loses Its Light |
03 Apr 2005 05:57:00 PM |
|
|
On Sun, 3 Apr 2005 10:16:17 -0500, "Denis Loubet" <dloubet@io.com> in
alt.abortion with message-id <O4ednR0eV9amlM3fRVn-1A@io.com> wrote:
"666" <son0fam@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1112507959.922601.37670@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Washington Post
April 3, 2005
The Church Loses Its Light
They'll just screw another one in.
They have been cloning for hundreds of years.
.
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Levy Oates" |
|
| Title: Re: The Church Loses Its Light |
03 Apr 2005 06:41:31 AM |
|
|
On 2 Apr 2005 21:59:19 -0800, "666" <son0fam@yahoo.com> wrote:
The Church Loses Its Light
Should've paid the electric bill on time.
---------
Levy Oates
http://www.angelfire.com/alt/bumblism/
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "stoney" |
|
| Title: Re: The Church Loses Its Light |
07 Apr 2005 02:41:07 AM |
|
|
On 2 Apr 2005 21:59:19 -0800, "666" <son0fam@yahoo.com> wrote:
Washington Post
April 3, 2005
The Church Loses Its Light
In John Paul II, World Found a Direct, Dynamic Leader
It was a black light that burned out. Not to worry though the bulb
will be replaced.
[]
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
.
|
|
|
| User: "Les Hellawell" |
|
| Title: Re: The Church Loses Its Light |
07 Apr 2005 11:21:50 AM |
|
|
On Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:41:07 -0700, stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
On 2 Apr 2005 21:59:19 -0800, "666" <son0fam@yahoo.com> wrote:
Washington Post
April 3, 2005
The Church Loses Its Light
In John Paul II, World Found a Direct, Dynamic Leader
It was a black light that burned out. Not to worry though the bulb
will be replaced.
How many cardinals does it take to replace a Pope?
None, Christ appoints the Pope on dad's behalf
Why do hundreds of Cardinals meet to appoint a Pope then?
There is no Christ or god to decide.
--
Les Hellawell
greetings from
YORKSHIRE - The White Rose County
.
|
|
|
| User: "stoney" |
|
| Title: Re: The Church Loses Its Light |
07 Apr 2005 04:19:43 PM |
|
|
On Thu, 07 Apr 2005 12:21:50 +0100, Les Hellawell
<myshredder@leswell.freeuk.com> wrote:
On Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:41:07 -0700, stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
On 2 Apr 2005 21:59:19 -0800, "666" <son0fam@yahoo.com> wrote:
Washington Post
April 3, 2005
The Church Loses Its Light
In John Paul II, World Found a Direct, Dynamic Leader
It was a black light that burned out. Not to worry though the bulb
will be replaced.
How many cardinals does it take to replace a Pope?
None, Christ appoints the Pope on dad's behalf
Why do hundreds of Cardinals meet to appoint a Pope then?
There is no Christ or god to decide.
Why do Cardinals wear red?
Bloodstains from all the backstabbing blend in.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
