{"id":3191,"date":"2005-04-01T17:12:11","date_gmt":"2005-04-02T01:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/index.php\/archives\/2005\/04\/01\/pope\/"},"modified":"2005-04-01T17:12:11","modified_gmt":"2005-04-02T01:12:11","slug":"pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/01\/pope\/","title":{"rendered":"Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tWith Pope John Paul II nearing death,<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>, BTW, that the church didn’t resort to heroic measures to prolong his suffering. There’s a lesson in that for sure.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Christopher Hitchens places rather more emphasis<\/a> on John Paul II’s failings:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That last sentence would be a reference to the pedophile coverup, about which he mentions a bit of irony: <\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> by faint praise.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Pope”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sbifyw-pope","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}