With Pope John Paul II nearing death, I’ll once more demonstrate the maxim that you don’t need to know anything to have an opinion. He was apparently one of the better Popes, having helped make the world a better place by organizing the Solidarity Movement in Poland and pressuring the Soviet Union to reform.
His legacy was tarnished by the church’s coverup of the massive child sexual abuse ring operating in America inside the church, and by his opposition to the liberation of Iraq.
On issues of culture and morals, he took the right side of the evolution vs. creationism debate, and the wrong side in the gruesome Schiavo spectacle. Other bloggers have pointed out, BTW, that the church didn’t resort to heroic measures to prolong his suffering. There’s a lesson in that for sure.
I doubt that his successor will be as good, but one thing he needs to do quite promptly is kick Fr. Frank Pavone, the Schindler family goon who’s called Michael Schiavo and Judge Greer “murderers”, out of the church. Excommunicating Gerry Adams would also be a good move. Their idiotic opposition to birth control also has to go.
If the Catholic Church is to have a future in America, it has to stand for morality and decency and strongly against the exploitation of weak minds through anti-scientific teachings and the manipulation of emotion. Given that the Catholics operate some good schools, I’d like to see them make their reforms and stick around for a while.
Christopher Hitchens places rather more emphasis on John Paul II’s failings:
No obituary about John Paul II, for example, will omit to mention that he exerted enormous force to change the politics of Poland. Well, good for him, I would say. (He behaved much better on that occasion than he did when welcoming Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein’s most blood-spattered henchmen, to an audience at the Vatican and then for a private visit to Assisi.) But let nobody confuse the undermining of a Stalinist bureaucracy in a majority Catholic nation with the insidious attempt to thwart or bend the law in a secular democracy. And let nobody say that this is no problem.
That last sentence would be a reference to the pedophile coverup, about which he mentions a bit of irony:
A church that has allowed no latitude in its teachings on masturbation, premarital sex, birth control, and divorce suddenly asks for understanding and “wiggle room” for the most revolting crime on the books.
This is a mixed legacy, at best. Dean Esmay entertains the question of whether JP II was evil, and concludes he wasn’t in a definitive example of damning by faint praise.
It appears that most of JP II’s good works in Poland were done before he became Pope, and the bad deeds afterwards, so there’s an argument to made that the institution itself corrupted him. I suppose that’s the point.
While I’m not actually a religious person myself — I don’t even go to church on Easter — I’ve always been curious about religion and even spent very many years in the orbit of an Indian guru (wasted years) and in recent years I’ve tended to defend religious people in America from their hard-edged critics on the grounds that they contributed in a positive way to our public policy dialog.
My tendency now is not to do this anymore. I’ve been extremely disappointed by the willingness of our religious friends to toss out the Constitution and its Federalist principles to achieve (what they think) is a single good result. That’s so incredibly stupid that I can’t stomach it or anyone who holds to such thinking. So the religious fanatics are on their own.
I normally enjoy your intellectual ‘bomb throwing’ but I will note tonight that I was touched by your comments on your failed spiritual search.
‘Tis a hard row we hoe, eh?
Thoughtful, intospective post, Richard.
Did you ever venture into the society of Friends (Quakers)? A friend’s son became so involved in the meditation practice that he has been sent to buddhist congregations to teach meditation, which I understand includes levitation, but have myself never observed the same. It is said of Quaker practice that it doesn’t involve belief in anything, and that may be true. For me, it presented a healthy framework for raising my children, and they are quite solid adults now.
Sorry for the plug. (Ooops, bad seque. Forgive my sense of humor.) But the spectacle of the far right obsessing on the sad end of Ms. Schiavo has probably done a lot of damage to the ‘religious’ extremes of the Republican party, for which I’m not exactly sorry. And the damage to Tom DeLay can’t be too large … he is a dangerous man.
I went to a couple of Quaker meetings in Austin, and found them pretty interesting, but it was a little too much like group therapy for my taste, and not nearly exotic enough.
As religions go, they’re pretty reasonable, but they would anguish about their non-violence to rather great extremes, wondering aloud whether it was OK to defend your family from a violent attacker. That doesn’t seem to require a whole lot of reflection in my book, but I don’t consider non-violence a serious moral position.
I guess you have to go to one the levitates (note the similarity to the word ‘levity’?) – not sure where that was.
You said: ” I’ve been extremely disappointed by the willingness of our religious friends to toss out the Constitution and its Federalist principles to achieve (what they think) is a single good result.”
You seem to mean by that the ‘religious’ right, I don’t know of other groups that are at that point. If you mean further involvement by mainstream religion (MSR) are you sure? Not my observation.
Remember Jefferson tried to militate against even allowing references to God in the early documents such as the Declaration of Independence. Separation of church and state was a *sine qua non* to the founding fathers.
I’m not sure disrespect for our constitutional principles will play at all with the public.
My feelings exactly, Richard.
Sorry to hear your position which seems to be that you will no longer seek to defend those with whom you disagree. Plenty of folk seem to be inclined to interpret the constitution as well as to take it literally when it suits them.
A majority of Americans view themselves as religious to some degree and the logical extension of your thinking would isolate you from any that don’t agree with you.
Unfortunately you will need to stop reading the Wall Street Journal since it also disagrees with your view of the constitutional reasoning of the Schiavo case. You will also do well to discard most scientific historic figures as most of them held religious beliefs incompatible with your own – although Galileo got into a bit of trouble with the Jesuits that didn’t seem to dampen his faith. But you do get to keep Carl Sagan.
1) A majority of Americans may describe themselves as “religious,” but for a whole lot of them that seems to translate to, “I go to church on Sunday, scope out the girls in the front pew and hope that they’re there with me in the afterlife.” I seriously doubt that the majority of American churchgoers see eye-to-eye with either the Catholic hierarchy or the Evangelical Right on any number of issues.
2) The Constitutional knowledge of the editorial columnists of the Wall St. Journal can be fit into the average thimble and still leave room for your thumb. The disconnect between the WSJ’s reporters (an excellent bunch) and their editorial writers (an incredibly clueless bunch of flacks) has been evident for many years.
Right, Ruth, I was mainly talking about the religious right, but there are elements of the religious left who make similar errors of judgment. Religion certainly has a role in forming moral values for people, but these values don’t translate directly into politics, as it is deeply enmeshed in the prediction of institutional effects. We all care about the poor and the downtrodden, but we have different ideas about how to help them. Politics is about the “how”, but the religious fundamentalists of both the left and the right mistakenly thing it’s about the “what”.
Like Mark said, Stuart, most religious Americans aren’t fanatics, and I was only talking about the fanatics.
Defending the right of others to hold diverse opinions is one thing, but helping them destroy the Constitution is completely different.
And both the WSJ and NRO have been extremely irresponsible the last couple of weeks. At bottom, the Schiavo case was simply a review of the Karen Ann Quinlan case, in which America decided that the functioning of the brain rather than the heart was the key to making life and death decisions. It makes no sense to artificially pump food into a heart beating inside a brainless body.
You wrote “but the religious fundamentalists of both the left and the right mistakenly thing it’s about the “what”. ” Talking about the unfortunate.
Please elaborate thanks.
I mean the extremists view political issues as symobolic measures they support or oppose as an expression of identity, not as programs that work or don’t. I think everybody would like to reduce poverty, so the different positions of left and right on the welfare program don’t say much about their relative degrees of compassion. The welfare program wasn’t achieving its goal until the Gingrich reform; it was actually encouraging laziness and indolence as well as helping people in a limited way. Now it helps people in need in more significant ways, and doesn’t promote idleness.
But the far left critcized the welfare reform as heartless, and the far right said it should be abolished altogether.
So it’s not what they legislate that matters, it’s how they legislate.
Though I don’t agree, I do see your point.
@RB
Thanks for elucidating.
Perhaps this explains why there is so much frustration between the different viewpoints. You interpret the Schiavo case as a question of law surrounding death. I see the case as a question about determination of guardianship (although the courts didn’t want to handle it that way). Everyone I have talked to about this (not a religious fanatic in the bunch) is either bothered about the guardianship question or fairly uninformed about details about the behavior of the Schiavos and Schindlers.
Terri Schiavo died of a heart attack brought on by severe bulimia in 1990. The enamel on her teeth was eroded and her stomach lining was torn because she had it so bad.
Most people with bulimia have weird family dynamics, and refusing to admit your child is dead is certainly consistent.
Stuart, do you prefer to grant guardianship to people who are demonstrably insane over a former husband who’s been sane enough to move on with his life after seven years of attempted rehabilitation?
Pardon the expression, but it’s a no-brainer.
Sorry but the ‘facts’ you state are in dispute, that she suffered a heart attack, that she suffered from severe bulimia and that her family is insane. I have heard enough counter evidence to think it more than reasonable to investigate these and other ‘facts’ as well as the myriad of circumstantial evidence that indicate the husband was unfit to be holding a position of guardian. A better judgement would be to take into account all of the evidence as is now available and reconsider any former conclusions made. As the controversy grew it seemed the prudent thing to do. This case is turning out to be a landmark case which has touched the globe and should not be so lightly dismissed. Granted there are a variety of motivations, including the religious ‘fanatic’ ones cited earlier, but to ignore the much broader base of support is to dismiss a wide perspective.
The facts of the case aren’t in dispute in a legal sense. They were adjudicated in a court of law, and reviewed by all the courts of appeal, even those that weren’t relevant.
1. Terri weighed 240 lbs at age 18.
2. Terri weighed 110 at age 25.
3. Terri had bulimia.
4. Terri had a heart attack due to low potassium, a common condition for bulimics.
5. Mike tried for years to rehabilitate her.
The rest is academic, and it’s extremely disgusting that so many people want to beat up on poor Mike after all he’s been through.
Terri was bulimic. If you want to blame somebody for that, blame her parents because she was already puking-up her pizza when she met Mike.
Certainly these are the facts according to the legal rulings and we all know that legal rulings are irrefutable.
Consider this factoid as a motivator for some of the public opinion:
Another Zogby question – this directly on Terri’s circumstances.
“If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water,” the poll asked.
A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9 percent said yes.
http://zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=11131 Zogby Poll: Americans Not in Favor of Starving Terri Schiavo
[I’ve really got to sort out the XHTML syntax – the preview pane doesn’t inspire confidence.]
Terri was in a coma (PVS is a coma) and on life-support, so the Zogby question doesn’t relate to her situation. Yes, I know people say it was just a feeding tube, but it was connected to a dosing pump forcing food and water into her belly, just as much life support as a ventilator “just delivering air” to her lungs would have been.
How do you explain away the bulimia?
I have heard repeatedly that she was not bulimic but I don’t profess to be an expert in these things. Losing 130 pounds in 7 years translates into losing an average of about 1/3 of a pound per week not my idea of a severe diet.
Certainly there are legal definitions of these terms but there is a need to apply some commonsense to these conditions. Terri may have been legally comatose but it something else to hear her seemingly respond to questions verbally a couple of years ago. I heard the tape and am troubled by the use a term that equates her to a sub-animal life form. The Nazis first went after ‘defective’ people before they went after Jews and others. They did this in part by dehumanizing these people. I am not implying that our judicial system is Nazi like, but I believe that many reasonable people weren’t convinced that the diagnosis was accurate and that the courts were not willing to prove this before the public.
She went from 240 to 140 in less than two years. What does that look like to you?
I’ve heard the audio tape you heard, and it didn’t sound like a conscious person to me. She was moaning at a regular interval, and the questioner timed his questions to fall into the zone where she could be predicted to be silent.
The pro-tuber faction has unfortunately created a parallel universe out of non-facts to justify their using this case as an icon for the “culture of life”.
The glove don’t fit.