Liberal Media And Passing Of The Pope

[David]

NY Times can't find people to praise the Pope. The MSM trashing begins. NY Times
Catholic Leader's Death Comes After Long and Public Illness
By IAN FISHER

VATICAN CITY, April 2 - Pope John Paul II died today, finally succumbing to years of illness endured painfully and publicly, ending an extraordinary, if sometimes polarizing, 26-year reign that remade the papacy.

He died in his chambers here at 9:37 p.m. local time, the Vatican said. Tens of thousands of people were holding a vigil for the pope outside his window when his death was announced by the Vatican, as untold millions around the world offered their prayers for him. "Our beloved Holy Father John Paul has returned to the house of the Father," Archbishop Leonardo Sandri said in announcing the pope's death to the crowd in St. Peter's Square, according to Reuters.

After the news was received, people in the crowd wept, bowed their heads in prayer or stared silently. John Paul's death came after two months of seriously declining health, which hit a crisis on Thursday, when John Paul suffered heart and circulatory collapse and developed a urinary tract infection and unstable blood pressure.

On Friday, the Vatican announced he was in "very grave" condition, and this morning it said he was fading out of consciousness. That was the first time the Vatican had said he was not fully lucid, though his chief spokesman, Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, insisted he was not in a coma. Dr. Navarro-Valls said the pope had been alert enough on Friday night to express thanks to the crowd that had gathered outside.

By church rules, no sooner than 15 days from the pope's death, and no later than 20, the 117 cardinals who will chose the 265th pope must meet in St. Peter's for what is called the "conclave," or the secret deliberations, and cast their votes. Some cardinals were already headed to Rome on Saturday.

The Vatican said the pope's body would be taken to St. Peter's Basilica to lie in state no earlier than Monday. A funeral date still has to be set by the College of Cardinals, although the Italian news media speculated that it would occur on Wednesday.

A Mass for the pope is scheduled for Sunday at 10:30 a.m. local time in St. Peter's Square.

The Italian government declared three days of mourning, and the world began to pay tribute.

President Bush said: "Laura and I join people across the earth in mourning the passing of Pope John Paul II. The Catholic Church has lost its shepherd, the world has lost a champion of human freedom, and a good and faithful servant of God has been called home.

"Pope John Paul II left the throne of St. Peter in the same way he ascended to it, as a witness to the dignity of human life."

President Jacques Chirac of France said he was "deeply moved" and that all of his country was in mourning.

Even before his death, expressions of grief and respect began to spill over not only in Rome, but in his home country of Poland, where in Warsaw churches remained open through the night; in Asia and Latin America, and particularly in Africa, a region in which the church has grown strongly under John Paul II's reign.

On a gray, rainy day in New York, people stopped by St. Patrick's Cathedral and other churches to attend Mass or say a prayer that the pope might pass on peacefully and without pain.

The latest crisis for the pope began on Thursday, when a urinary tract infection caused a high fever and a serious drop in his blood pressure. He was treated with antibiotics, and Dr. Navarro-Valls, a medical doctor though he did not treat the pope, said his condition temporarily stabilized.

"But in the following hours, it evolved negatively," he said.

At some point, he suffered what Dr. Navarro-Valls called "a state of septic shock and cardio-respiratory collapse." At 7:10 p.m. on Thursday the pope was given the sacrament for the sick and dying, often called "last rites," Dr. Navarro-Valls said.

Dr. Navarro-Valls said it was the pope's own decision not to return to the Gemelli hospital clinic, where he was admitted twice in February to be treated for the flu, fever and trouble breathing. On the second of those rushed trips to the hospital, doctors inserted a tube in his windpipe to allow him to breathe easier.

His last appearance in public came on Wednesday, when he appeared at his window off St. Peter's Square looking weak and gaunt. That same day, he had a feeding tube threaded from his nose to his stomach.

Born as Karol Wojtyla on May 18, 1920 in Wadowice, Poland, he was 84 years old and suffered for years from Parkinson's disease, which slumped his head, shook his hands and slurred his speech. In the last few weeks of his life, following two earlier hospitalizations and a tracheotomy operation in February, a pope known for his great ability as a communicator could hardly speak.

In 1978, he came to office as a fit and handsome 58 year-old, blessed with a charisma, intellectual vigor and energy that took him to 129 foreign countries as the pulse of the Catholic church moved away from Europe to Africa, Asia and Latin America.

He served either the second or third longest of any pope, depending who did the counting, in the nearly 2,000-year history of the papacy - making him the only Pope whom many young and middle-aged Catholics around the world remember clearly.

A Pole chosen as the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, he transformed the papacy into a television-ready voice for peace, war and life, from the womb to the wheelchair. He also reached beyond religion into politics, encouraging his fellow Poles and other Europeans to reject Communism. Some historians believe he deserves part of the credit for the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

John Paul's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

"The situation in the Catholic church is serious," Hans Kung, the eminent Swiss theologian, who was barred by from teaching in Catholic schools because of his liberal views, wrote last week. "The pope is gravely ill and deserves every compassion. But the Church has to live. ...

In my opinion, he is not the greatest pope but the most contradictory of the 20th century. A pope of many, great gifts, and of many bad decisions!"

Among liberal Catholics, he was criticized for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception, as well as the ordination of women and married men. Though he was never known as a strong administrator of the dense Vatican bureaucracy, he kept a centralizing hand on the selection of bishops around the world and enforced a rigid adherence to many basic church teachings among the clergy and Catholic theologians.

But he defied easy definition: For all his conservatism on social and theological issues, he was decidedly forward looking - too much so even for some cardinals - on the sensitive question of other religions. While never veering from his belief in the unique power of redemption of Jesus Christ, he reached out tirelessly to other faiths, becoming the first Pope to step foot in a synagogue, in Rome in 1986, as well as a mosque, in Damascus in 2001.

And, as attention turned to who might be the next the Pope - would he be old or young; conservative or liberal; Italian, South American or African? - most experts said John Paul charisma would no longer be optional. He was a most public man, bear-hugging, chatting and preaching the value of love with a warmth that belied his often-doctrinaire positions on church issues.

Though the next week will be devoted to praising and burying John Paul II - he will be interred aside other popes inside the subterranean grottoes at St. Peter's Basilica - the ancient institution of the Roman Catholic church will soon turn toward the future and the selection of the next Pope. No sooner than 15 days from today, and no later than 20, most of the 117 voting members of the College of Cardinals will meet in secrecy below the frescos of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel to decide who will inherit the seat of St. Peter.

The Vatican statement announcing his death said: "The procedure foreseen by the apostolic constitution in 'Universi Dominici gregis', promulgated by John Paul II on February 22, 1996, has been put into place."

The cardinals who gather will be, by long tradition, cut off from the outside world during their deliberations, though now in a new $20 million residence, outfitted like a hotel, built by John Paul II on the Vatican grounds. They cannot make phone calls, read newspapers, watch television or listen to the radio. All but three of the cardinals were appointed by John Paul II and to some extent share his conservative views, but there is no guarantee the next Pope will be chosen in his image.

"Always follow a fat pope with a skinny pope," goes a typically knowing old Roman saying. Some Vatican watchers call it the "pendulum effect," in which cardinals seek to restore a balance - or to correct faults in the previous pope - as they work, in the words of one papal expert, to answer the question: What sort of pope do we need for what sort of world?

There is, at the moment, no favorite in the running, no single, obvious inheritor to John Paul II's formidable legacy. In theory, the cardinals can select any Catholic male for the job, but in practice, it will almost certainly be one of them.

In making their choice, the cardinals will have to weigh the range of issues facing the church - many of which, critics as well as some supporters argue, have been left languishing in the Pope's illness, especially these last few months of virtual incapacitation.

Among those issues are: the increasing secularism of Europe, where the church has become a decidedly less relevant institution; poverty and the widening economic divide between the northern hemisphere and the south, where the church is growing strongest; the balance of power between the church bureaucracy and local bishops, along with the concern that the Vatican bureaucracy has long been left to its own devices without day-to-day coordination by the pope; relations with other faiths, particularly Islam and the rising number of Muslim immigrants in Europe; the undermining of the authority of church in the United States after the wrenching sex scandals there.

Not least, the long illness of John Paul II - and the realities of modern medicine - may force the cardinals to confront an uncomfortable and historic change: whether the next Pope should be forced to retire after a certain age. Already bishops are required to hand in their resignations at 75, an age at which this pope was beginning to show the signs of sickness.

"We elected a Holy Father, not an eternal father," went one quip attributed to a during the 25-year reign of Leo XII, who died in 1903. That saying has been resurrected often to apply to John Paul II, but with more immediacy now that the Vatican realizes that a papacy of 20 years may no longer be unusual.

[David]

Be sure to follow the link on Powerline. They have "grabbed" the NY Times page. Shows an insider's note asking for a "supporter's quote." Times has since corrected the error. However, Powerline caught it for posterity.

Powerline
SOURCE
Pope John Paul II Dies; Times Can't Find Someone Who Liked Him

Pope John Paul II died this afternoon. The New York Times reports on his papacy in an article that inadvertently tells us more than the Times really wanted us to know. The Times had its criticisms of John Paul's papacy ready to go, but apparently went looking for something good to say about the Pope at the last minute:

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

"The situation in the Catholic church is serious," Hans Kung, the eminent Swiss theologian, who was barred by from teaching in Catholic schools because of his liberal views, wrote last week. "The pope is gravely ill and deserves every compassion. But the Church has to live. ...

In my opinion, he is not the greatest pope but the most contradictory of the 20th century. A pope of many, great gifts, and of many bad decisions!"

Among liberal Catholics, he was criticized for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception, as well as the ordination of women and married men. Though he was never known as a strong administrator of the dense Vatican bureaucracy, he kept a centralizing hand on the selection of bishops around the world and enforced a rigid adherence to many basic church teachings among the clergy and Catholic theologians.

There you have it. The Times' criticisms are ready to go, a few good words for the Pope are an afterthought.

[David]

Here we go. Notice who the media chooses as experts. All critics of the Pope. Almost all Libs.Journal News-Upstate New York
SOURCE

Networks ready to cover papal succession
By GARY STERN
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: April 2, 2005)

They will be America's tour guides through St. Peter's Square, not to mention Roman Catholic history.

They are the "expert" commentators lined up by each major television network to walk viewers through what is a momentous news story: the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of his successor. In the recent weeks that the pope's health has failed, they have been keeping their passports close at hand for a red-eye to Rome.

"I think it's a sign of respect for the pope; I don't think it's ghoulish," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of America magazine and one of the foremost commentators on the Catholic Church.

"I think the networks want to do a decent job and need the experts to guide them," Reese said. "It's going to be a real media frenzy, especially the first 48 hours. TV people are spectacular when it comes to covering events, and they love Catholics with the beautiful liturgy, the music. What a stage. But they're not as good at talking about ideas."

That's where the experts come in. While the networks will interview as many big-name Catholics as they can reel in, they will depend in large part on these analysts for wire-to-wire commentary and explanation

• ABC: The Rev. Richard McBrien of Notre Dame University, one of the most liberal and independent-minded Catholic commentators in the country and a frequent critic of Pope John Paul II. And the Rev. Andrew Greeley, the famous Chicago priest, novelist and sociologist, who has long insisted that the church hierarchy is out of touch with the laity and unwilling to share power.

• CBS: Monsignor Robert Wister of Seton Hall University, a church historian who offered commentary for CBS during the last conclave in 1978. And Robert Blair Kaiser, an ex-Jesuit who covered Vatican II and is often critical of John Paul II.

• CNN: John Allen, Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, an insightful, even-handed analyst and dogged reporter who understands Vatican intrigue as well as any journalist.

• Fox: The network did not want to identify its experts under contract. Fox has often used Raymond Flynn, the former Boston mayor and U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

• NBC: George Weigel, a leading conservative commentator on Catholicism and culture who wrote a glowing and widely respected biography of John Paul II.

These analysts will be expected to talk viewers through John Paul II's legacy, the nine-day mourning period, the pope's burial, the opening of the conclave — the voting process to choose the next pope — the shaky list of assumed contenders for the papacy and, finally, the presentation of the next pope and an instant analysis of who he is and where he might lead the Catholic Church.

They will be available most of their waking hours. Allen, for instance, said he will be at CNN's Rome bureau from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m., Rome time, so that he will be on CNN's afternoon and prime-time coverage in the U.S.

Most have been under contract for years. Weigel signed with NBC in 1999, and Wister's current deal was made five years ago.

It will not be an easy gig. The experts will be expected to fill a lot of air time and will have to repeatedly recycle the same themes, especially during long periods when there will be no news.

"I learned in '78 how anxious the broadcasters are that what they say be accurate," Wister said. "They realize they can't be instant experts. There will be a lot of time-filling, a lot of talking about who's there, what seems to be happening, the rumors. But this will be a major world event."

Viewers will certainly get a different take on John Paul II, not to mention the overall challenges facing the Catholic Church, from different commentators. Weigel and McBrien are both articulate, personable and prone to strong opinions. But Weigel is a leading neo-conservative — one of the most visible Catholic defenders of the war in Iraq — and a staunch defender of John Paul II. McBrien, on the other hand, has long been an outspoken critic of Catholic leadership, drawing the ire of the American bishops, among others, and is a proponent of women's ordination to the priesthood and other reforms.

Weigel said his main draw is the work that went into the biography "Witness to Hope," for which he was given unprecedented access to John Paul II.

"What I'd hope to bring is a detailed knowledge of the pontificate of John Paul II and of the Catholic situation around the world," he said.

McBrien said his strength will be his knowledge of the church, not his ideology.

"I don't think that ABC asked me to serve as an on-air commentator for my 'slant' but for my knowledge and judgment," he said. "NBC evidently chose George Weigel because of his biography of the pope. I do believe that he will find it difficult to acknowledge any deficiencies whatever in the pontificate of John Paul II."

Allen has become an overnight star since getting the Rome spot for National Catholic Reporter in 2000 and has already become a common sight on CNN. Although NCR is a liberal Catholic newspaper, Allen's weekly Web column — www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/ — is respected for its balanced reporting and analysis.

"Honestly, I find it's best not to think too much about how consequential my commentary may be, and focus instead simply on trying to get the story right, which is difficult enough on its own," Allen said.

When the Catholic Church last mourned a pope and opened a conclave in 1978, the wait for the white smoke —announcing a pope's election — was covered by an electronic media horde that was primitive by today's standards. CNN was still two years from launching. An early satellite dish cost $10,000 and took up a backyard. The World Wide Web was a decade from development and almost two decades from being noticed.

To be sure, there was expanded network news coverage when Pope John Paul I was elected on Aug. 26, 1978, when he died 33 days later, and when John Paul II was chosen Oct. 16.

But it was nothing like the minute-by-minute, 24/7 wave of commentary, analysis, debate, rumor, hyperbole, real drama, forced drama and repetition that will wash over TV watchers when John Paul II's historic pontificate ends.

"We're going to be looking at a lot of retrospectives on TV, a lot of biographical documentaries on John Paul, interviews with heads of state," said Stewart Hoover, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, who specializes in religion coverage.

[David]

George Weigel is a good guy.

[aintnomeaning]

I just watched the Frontline special on the Pope.

It was almost all criticism from journalists, actresses, liberation theologists, and ex-priests who were kicked out do to their nonsense.

It was, like all leftist hack jobs, an exercise in lauding the man personally, and massacring his message and his motivations of subjective outcroppings of personal experience.

[David]

Here we go. NY Times is getting frisky as time goes on and the phony respect is put behind them. NY Times

Catholics in America: A Restive People
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
SOURCE
IT is hard to remember now that when Pope John Paul II was elected 27 years ago, the church he inherited was destabilized and dispirited.

His immediate predecessor, John Paul I, had been found dead in bed one morning after only 34 days in office. The pope before that, Paul VI, spent his last years melancholy and withdrawn, his accomplishments overshadowed by the uproar over Humanae Vitae, his encyclical affirming the church's ban on contraception.

To many Roman Catholics in the United States, in particular, the church seemed to have lost its moorings. Some felt the church had betrayed the promise of Vatican II, the watershed church council of the early 1960's, to be more responsive to the laity and to modern life. Others felt the opposite, that Vatican II had betrayed the church's heritage by discarding too many traditions and teachings, like replacing the Latin Mass with guitar-strumming priests.

Then John Paul II strode onto the scene. He reasserted order and discipline, spoke out forcefully on vital issues and gave the church a clear direction again. But many American Catholics are deeply unhappy with that direction, which has proved to be more conservative and inflexible than they had hoped. As his papacy ends, he leaves behind an American church that he energized but that remains restive and divided.

The nation has more Catholics now than ever before, some 65 million and growing, fed by a steady flow of immigrants. Many who attend Mass regularly are passionately engaged in their parishes. But many others have drifted away, and Mass attendance has fallen steadily throughout John Paul II's papacy. Fewer families are sending their children to Catholic schools every year.

The pope has inspired men to join the priesthood, but a nationwide shortage of priests has nonetheless grown so acute that many parishes have none of their own. At the same time, many priests and bishops quietly complain that the Vatican has centralized authority more than ever, leaving less able to respond flexibly to the concerns of American parishioners. And the church continues to reel from the effects of the clergy sex-abuse scandal, with more priests accused of molestation nearly every week and with the mounting cost of compensating victims driving several dioceses to seek bankruptcy protection.

Despite the troubles within his church, Pope John Paul II has had a profound impact outside it, in American politics and culture. His articulation of an ideal society based on a "culture of life" has been embraced not only by American Catholics, but by non-Catholics who have invoked it in their opposition to abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, cloning and the death penalty.

On a visit to St. Louis in 1999, the Pope spoke of a conflict in America "between a culture that affirms, cherishes and celebrates the gift of life, and a culture that seeks to declare entire groups of human beings - the unborn, the terminally ill, the handicapped and others considered 'unuseful' - to be outside the boundaries of legal protection."

"Because of the seriousness of the issues involved, and because of America's great impact on the world as a whole, the resolution of this new time of testing will have profound consequences," he said.

A handful of American bishops tried to bring their moral authority to bear directly on elective politics last year, suggesting that Catholic politicians who have supported abortion rights could not receive communion - a step that many other bishops and priests viewed with deep misgivings.

To the Roman Catholic church in America, John Paul II has been both a heroic, loving father and a strict disciplinarian. When he became pope, "he was relatively young as popes go, charismatic and vigorous, and very self-confident," said Russell Shaw, the Washington correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic magazine, and a former spokesman for the American bishops. Within a year, John Paul II was captivating crowds in Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden, and Time magazine featured him on the cover under the headline "John Paul Superstar."

"Whether you like what he did or not, he turned the whole leadership deficit around," Mr. Shaw said.

For a church still vacillating over how to implement the revolution that was Vatican II, he drew clear boundaries on issues small and grand that have affected every priest and churchgoing American Catholic, not always comfortably.

"You could tell he loved his priests, and then there would be policies that would come out that would be very difficult for the priests," said the Rev. Robert Silva, president of the National Federation of Priests' Councils. "It was almost a love-hate relationship."

Most Catholics' experience of their church comes primarily through their local parish and their parish priest. During the papacy of John Paul II, the shortage of priests has become nothing less than a crisis. There are just under 24,000 diocesan priests on active duty today, down by one-fifth from 1990, and many of those active priests are well beyond retirement age. Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reckons that more than one-quarter of American priests are now over 75, and in five years the figure will be nearly 40 percent.

Though the priest shortage is a worldwide phenomenon, the pope has reaffirmed that the church will not consider allowing priests to marry or the ordination of women as priests. Though popular with traditionalists, this policy has disappointed many American Catholics, priests included, who have petitioned the church to open the issue for discussion.

One researcher estimates that one priest in five is now circuit-riding to two or three or four churches each weekend so that parishioners may participate in the sacrament of the eucharist, which only a priest can provide.

Deacons and lay Catholics have stepped into the void, taking up as many parish responsibilities as they are allowed. Last year, for the first time, lay parish administrators outnumbered priests, and the practical reality is that many United States parishes are effectively being run by female parish administrators.

Lay movements of all kinds are proliferating. Opus Dei, a conservative movement of clerics and laity, has been gaining in numbers and influence in the United States with the help of the pope, who declared it a "personal prelature," making it answerable only to Rome. Meanwhile, the sexual abuse scandal and the hierarchy's secretive handling of it have given rise to the Voice of the Faithful, a mobilization of Catholics who have demanded greater public accountability and more lay input in church affairs, so far to little effect.

Sister Christine Schenk, director of FutureChurch, a Cleveland-based group that advocates opening ordination to women, said, "There is a sense of people feeling dispirited - not only the laity, but twice as much by the bishops - because so many of those bishops are caught in the middle," dealing daily with problems in the priesthood but powerless to make any significant changes.

In his role as law-giver, clarifying church teaching in the post-Vatican II era, John Paul II issued a record-breaking number of encyclicals, apostolic letters, rules for liturgy, a revised code of canon law and a new Catechism of the Catholic Church - many of them cutting off innovations that had been gaining popularity in the United States.

"There had been various experiments going on in the American church in worship, priests saying Mass without using liturgical vestments, people advocating the use of sake and rice cakes instead of bread and wine," said Msgr. Robert J. Wister of Seton Hall University. "He has sought to restabilize. He has clarified church teaching in a range of areas."

The overall message has been that it is up to Rome, not the national churches, to set the pace. "What this pontificate has done is given the church the keys to interpreting Vatican II," said George Weigel, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a papal biographer. "Vatican II was not intended to set off a 40-year cat-and-dog fight about who's in charge. It was intended as a great spiritual renewal for the church to prepare the church for its mission, which is evangelization."

Several times, initiatives advocated by many American bishops were shot down by the Vatican. The most telling episode was the struggle over the English-language version of the revised catechism. Its release was delayed for years because the Vatican rejected language favored by most American bishops that included both sexes.

Pope John Paul II also exerted an influence in American seminaries, sometimes by punitive means. The Vatican evicted the Rev. Charles Curran, a Catholic theologian, from his position at the Catholic University of America for criticizing the church's ban on contraception. A later directive issued by the American bishops at the Vatican's insistence required all theologians at Catholic institutions to sign a pledge of orthodoxy.

The turn toward traditionalism, not only in seminaries but in the church as a whole, has produced a new generation of more conservative priests, said Father Silva, of the federation of priests' councils. Now there is an unfortunate divide in the American priesthood, he said, between "Vatican II priests" who were trained before this papacy and "John Paul II priests" who are more orthodox in their orientation. Each tends to blame the other for the church's problems.

When John Paul II inherited the throne of St. Peter, "the church was looking for direction," said David Gibson, the author of "The Coming Catholic Church" and a religion journalist. "He provided it, and whether you liked it or not, you knew where you stood."

Perhaps because of his firm hand, perhaps in spite of it, Pope John Paul II energized the American church. Parishioners made pilgrimages to see him in St. Peter's Square and touch his "popemobile" as it went by. Young people flocked to Denver for World Youth Day in 1993 to receive the pontiff's blessing. In seven trips to the United States, speaking in English and Spanish and Polish, he made many American Catholics proud to be Catholic.

"It was like having Kennedy as president," Mr. Gibson said. "Whatever you thought of his policies, he was John Paul Superstar, the head of your church."

[David]

NY Times

In Boston, Mourning Is Tinged by Criticism
By PAM BELLUCK
SOURCE
BOSTON, April 2 - Jack Connors, a prominent member of this city's large Roman Catholic community, has a resonant memory of Pope John Paul II's visit to Boston in 1979. Throngs of people descended on Boston Common for a public Mass, many waiting for hours in a torrential rain.

"I was drenched," Mr. Connors said. "My kids wanted to know why are we here. We should have known it was a sign that we were in for some stormy weather."

It is the kind of anecdote that crystallizes the complex feelings many here have toward Pope John Paul II, who died on Saturday at the age of 84. It is a sense of awe and affection mixed with disappointment at his handling of the clergy sexual abuse crisis that exploded in Boston three years ago and continues to reverberate here.

"Am I angry with him? No," Mr. Connors said. "He was a good man and did what he thought was right. But regrettably, there wasn't as much thoughtfulness and oversight as one might hope for."

Similar reactions were common this weekend as many of the two million Catholics in and around Boston struggled with how to reconcile the respect and warmth they felt for John Paul with what they saw as too little attention paid too late to the problem of sexually abusive priests. In particular, there was criticism that when Cardinal Bernard F. Law was forced out of his position as Boston archbishop because of the scandal, he was not chastised or demoted, but was named archpriest of one of the four basilicas under Vatican direction in Rome, St. Mary Major Basilica.

"I think that it's fair to say that John Paul had kind of a love affair with Boston from the time he was archbishop of Krakow and he made a trip here," said Dr. James E. Post, a Boston University professor who is president of Voice of the Faithful, a lay Catholic group that formed in response to the sexual abuse crisis. Adding to Boston's sense of connection with the pope, he said, was the appointment of Boston's former mayor, Raymond Flynn, as American ambassador to the Vatican in the mid-1990's. "There was always a perception of a warm relationship between the people of Boston and the Holy Father."

But, Dr. Post said, "His behavior in response to the sex abuse crisis disappointed many Catholics. He seemed very reluctant to remove Cardinal Law or accept Cardinal Law's resignation. His personal relationship with the cardinal seemed to stand in the way of his being willing to address the problems of the archdiocese."

Dr. Post said Boston Catholics appreciated some of what the pope eventually did, including meeting with American cardinals about the crisis.

"But when he brought Cardinal Law back to Rome and gave him the appointment at Mary Major, that was more than puzzling - it was deeply disturbing to Catholics in Boston," Dr. Post said. "It seemed that he was being rewarded for bad behavior, and run-of-the-mill ordinary Catholics just saw this as de facto an insult to the people of Boston."

The Rev. Walter Cuenin, pastor of Our Lady Help of Christians in Newton, one of dozens of priests who signed a petition seeking Cardinal Law's resignation in 2002, said he, too, felt that the pope's legacy in Boston was mixed.

In some ways he had a major, positive impact, Father Cuenin said, like his "outreach to the Jewish people," which encouraged substantial interfaith cooperation in Newton, a Boston suburb with many Jewish residents.

And Father Cuenin credited the pope for replacing Cardinal Law with Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, who quickly moved to pay financial settlements to sexual abuse victims who had sued the church.

But, Father Cuenin said: "For some Catholics, the sex abuse crisis, the way it was handled, the cover-up by the bishops, and then the appointment to Rome of Cardinal Law was not well received and remains a sore spot. There was a lot of feeling that the Vatican was somewhat distant from the crisis, and didn't seem to appreciate what was going on here. I think people would have felt better had Cardinal Law resigned from his ecclesial duties as all the priests involved in the sex abuse crisis had to do."

He added that the fact that Cardinal Law would be able to vote for the next pope, when Archbishop O'Malley cannot because he is not yet a cardinal, "is difficult for a lot of people."

Not every Catholic here shared such feelings.

"I think especially now, people of goodwill have a sense of admiration and loss," said Peter Meade, executive vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. "The man has accomplished so much, and I would hope people would let him be at peace."

But Bernie McDaid, who said he was abused by the Rev. Joseph E. Birmingham, was one of those wrestling with conflicting feelings. Father Birmingham, who died in 1989, was accused of molesting dozens of boys.

"I do not dislike the pope personally - he's probably a good man - but as far as this issue is concerned, there's been so much misunderstanding and fear," said Mr. McDaid, who along with a group of victims sought a meeting with the pope two years ago, and instead met with a Vatican official in Rome.

"They raped and robbed my soul, and there's almost a shame and a fear to acknowledge this and deal directly with this issue," he said. "I certainly felt stonewalled all the way up from the Boston diocese to Rome. I don't want to come off as callous and full of malice. But I had personally hoped that this pope would have been the one to come out publicly on this issue."

Dr. Post said he hoped that the next pope would "recognize that the sex abuse crisis worldwide is not over," and he added that there needed to be a "restoration of the church's moral integrity."

Father Cuenin said he expected that the new pope would be "a little more moderate, and perhaps someone who's not going to be pope for a long time."

"They have a saying in Italy now that the new pope will be old, Italian and not like to fly," he said. "Sometimes a shorter papacy is desired so the church can shift gears a little bit. And there is another saying that after a thin pope, you need a fat pope."

At a Mass at the Gate of Heaven Parish in South Boston shortly after the pope's death was announced, Deborah Hayes, 49, a parking attendant from South Boston, said the pope could have done more to help the archdiocese after the sexual abuse crisis and should not have reassigned Cardinal Law to Rome.

"I don't agree with it," Ms. Hayes said. "It was a reward, and there shouldn't have been a reward. If anything there should have been some jail time."

But another parishioner, Nancy Menjin, 44, of South Boston, who recalled watching the pope in a parade during his 1979 visit, said John Paul did all he could during the sexual abuse scandal.

"He's so far removed from here," she said. "I think more should have been done here at home. It's a long way from Rome."

Katie Zezima contributed reporting for this article.

[Randy]

Actually Fox is featuring a large number of orthodox Catholics.

David should get some of these folks on his show - from Catholic Answers, The St. Paul Center, Catholic League, Coming Home Network - that would be intereesting as some of the most prominent orthodox Catholics being featured are converts from evangelical Christianity. The Coming Home Network focuses on this and it would be great to get its founder, Marcu Grodi - a former minister himself, on the show.

I posted the following on the People thread but it bears repeating:

MSNBC is dragging out mostly the Catholic dissenters to comment on the Pope's death and what kind of new direction the next Pope must take the Church in. Greely, Drinan - that same old crowd.

What a nice change to see Fox news feature both beleiving and dissenting Catholics - with non-dissenters actually being less prominently featured.

Ironioc too that many of the Catholics featured on Fox are evangelical converts to the Catholic faith. Deal Hudson, Jeff Cavins, Tim Staples and the folks from the St. Paul Center for Biblical Studies.

The St. Paul Center was founded by Dr. Scott Hahn who was the top graduate in his class at Gordon-Cromweel divinity school 20 years ago.

His years as a evangelical pastor and his eventual conversion to Catholicism and subsequent emergence as a prominent orthodox Catholic theologians in the US have been recounted far and wide.

The St. Paul Center is a great source of orthodox Christian commentary on Scripture. They take on the Jesus Seminar and folks like McBrien and Drinan. But mostly its ministry is preparing orthodox Christians today, and in particular Catholics, to take part in a new evangelization of the West.

To hear them recounting Scripture in a traditional, orthodox way as they have had a chance to do on Fox these past few days is great.

None of this the miracles really didn't happen stuff that is a favorite of the likes of MSNBC and the mainstream media.

These guys are orthodox Christians bar none and its great to see that voivce getting airtime.

[David]

It's true Randy. FOX is doing a good job. Looks like MSNBC has turned it over to Chris Mathews. Means big doses of Andrew Greeley and Robert Drinan.

Here is a glimpse of what conerns the NY Times

New Pope Could Influence Political Life in America
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

Published: April 4, 2005


SOURCE




John Paul II
Go to Complete Coverage


...........


WASHINGTON, April 3 - The death of Pope John Paul II came at a time when leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, reflecting the tone set by the Vatican, have become increasingly assertive in American political life. Their stance has created strains with some Catholic Democrats just as the White House has sought to make inroads with the once solidly Democratic Catholic constituency.

Several Catholic academics and elected officials said on Sunday that the shift - highlighted last year when some church leaders said Senator John Kerry should be denied communion because he supports abortion rights - reflected the tone set by a pope who was known for being conservative and for being willing to confront governments to press his views. They said the choice of the next pontiff could thus prove nearly as important for American political life as for the Vatican itself, as Democrats and Republicans here face increasingly pitched battles over judicial nominations, abortion, gay rights and euthanasia.

One of the potential successors to John Paul is Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria, who during last year's presidential campaign said a politician who supported abortion "is not fit" to receive communion.

"I've seen an increase in directly political kinds of activity: what the responsibilities of Catholics are, how they should vote, etc.," said Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and the author of numerous books and articles on religion and politics. "Some Vatican officials are pressing for more direct activism in public life and are willing to be more critical of public policy figures who do not take what they consider to be the right positions on policy issues."

John T. McGreevy, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, said: "John Paul had this culture of life vision. And that has sort of radicalized and emboldened some bishops."

The attempt by some Catholic Church leaders to influence American policy goes back at least to the 1930's, when bishops pressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create Social Security. The notion of church activism was fostered by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council 40 years ago, which encouraged bishops to advocate government programs to help the poor.

But in recent years, the emphasis has shifted away from fighting poverty and standing up for civil rights, issues associated with the Democratic Party, and toward issues like opposition to abortion, gay rights and euthanasia, issues that Mr. Bush and the Republicans have embraced.

At times last year, this assertiveness went beyond policy and into electoral politics, as some bishops hinted that their parishioners should vote for Mr. Bush instead of Mr. Kerry. At St. Patrick's Church in Wareham, Mass., for example, parishioners said that at the Saturday evening Mass right after the death of the pope, they were given pamphlets notifying them that they would be asked next week to sign postcards to Mr. Kerry and the state's other Democratic senator, Edward M. Kennedy, reading: "Please do not make support of the U.S. Supreme Court's abortion decision a litmus test for judicial nominees."

The rising assertiveness of some church leaders is particularly significant for American politics because President Bush has been making a concerted effort to win support among Catholic voters. Mr. Bush's efforts are part of an overall drive by his chief adviser, Karl Rove, to make inroads among typically Democratic groups of voters.

Mr. Bush assembled a group of Catholic advisers and began meeting with them regularly as soon as he entered the White House. Shortly after the Vatican announced the death of the pontiff, Mr. Bush and Laura Bush walked in unannounced to a Saturday afternoon Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. Mr. Bush's aides said Sunday that he expected to attend the funeral but had not made formal plans pending an invitation from the Vatican.

In talking about the dispute over the fate of Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman who died last week, Mr. Bush borrowed what had been a signature phrase of John Paul, as he talked about guarding "the culture of life," and he has forcefully embraced the Vatican's views on abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage.

"It is remarkable that a Republican non-Catholic president would be echoing this papal phrase," Professor McGreevy said. "Clearly, focusing on abortion and end-of-life issues, that was a big issue of this pope."

There is evidence that Mr. Bush has had some success in this regard. In last year's presidential election, Catholics supported Mr. Bush over Mr. Kerry, a Roman Catholic, by 52 percent to 47 percent, according to a survey of voters leaving the polls. Catholics made up 27 percent of the electorate last year, but they are disproportionately clustered in swing states, particularly Ohio and Pennsylvania, making them an important target in presidential campaigns.

Roman Catholics, however, are hardly a unified bloc of voters, and some analysts suggested on Sunday that the prominent bishops at the forefront of these recent battles are more conservative than most Catholic voters or, indeed, their fellow bishops.

Most polls show that Catholics support at least some access to abortion. And Mr. Bush's success with those voters last year came among the more devout: regular church-going Catholics supported him by 56 percent to 43 percent. Catholics who attend church less than once a week supported Mr. Bush by 50 percent to 49 percent. Mr. Kerry was the third Catholic who has won a major party's nomination for president; Kennedy was the only Catholic to have been elected president. After Mr. Kerry's defeat, a number of Democrats said they could not see how in this environment a Catholic Democrat could win the presidency, given that he or she would almost certainly have to support abortion rights to win the nomination.

There is arguably no other religion that has had such a contentious relationship with American politics, and Mr. Kerry is certainly not the first roman Catholic politician who has had difficulty with his church because of his views on issues of abortion. Most famously, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York tangled with Cardinal John J. O'Connor of New York after the cardinal said he did not see how "a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion."

Last May, 48 Democratic Catholics in Congress sent a letter to Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, the chairman of the Task Force on Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians, expressing concern about the threat of withholding communion from Catholic politicians who support abortion rights. One of the signers, Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said she hoped the change of leadership at the Vatican would result in the church's turning its attention to what had been a traditional concern: "the great traditions of economic and social justice."

Some Catholic leaders suggested it would be a mistake for the next pope to continue down the road of involvement in politics and policy.

"I really think it was counterproductive to have done what was done in the last election," said Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal, the magazine of the Catholic laity. "I don't think it's going to work. I think it's a mistake for bishops to get involved to that degree in policy. I don't think the bishops should tell people who they should vote for. All they do is dilute their own credibility."

[David]

The Pope hasn't been buried yet and the Libs are campaigning. Even taking polls. AP

AP Poll: New Pope Should Push for Change

By DONNA CASSATA
The Associated Press
Monday, April 4, 2005; 4:21 PM

WASHINGTON - Most Americans - Catholics and non-Catholics alike - want the next pope to allow priests to marry and women to join the priesthood, a major break from church rules and the judgment of Pope John Paul II, according to an Associated Press poll.

The charismatic pontiff was held in high regard by a majority of Americans and most Catholics, with many suggesting that John Paul will be remembered as one of the greatest popes. For many, the man who led the church for 26 years is the only pope they know.

But affection for John Paul has hardly eliminated the cultural divisions between the United States and the Vatican over the ordination of women, celibacy for priests and the role of lay people in the church.

"He was admired by people who disagreed so consistently on his views," John C. Green, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, said of the pontiff who died Saturday at 84.

The sex abuse scandal that has rocked the church has left many Catholics and other Americans convinced that the next pope must do more about predatory clergy. Eighty-six percent of Americans and 82 percent of the Catholics surveyed said greater steps were imperative.

Perhaps partly as an outgrowth of the abuse by priests, some also are calling for a larger church role for lay people, a notion that Rome has rejected. In the AP-Ipsos survey, 62 percent of Americans and 63 percent of American Catholics favor a greater say for lay people.

"The heart of the crisis has passed," said Martin E. Marty, a religion historian and professor emeritus of American religious history at the University of Chicago. Marty suggested that the bishops and the church still need to win back the confidence of Americans, and "the bishops and the church have to grasp this soon enough."

Changing views about the role of women and the predominance of married clergy in other faiths may help shape the opinions of Americans and American Catholics toward the Vatican's rules on ordination and priest's celibacy.

Catholics in the United States number 65 million - out of about 1 billion worldwide - and Jim Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., said American culture has had a significant influence on church members here.

"Catholics have considerable differences with Rome," Guth noted.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans and 60 percent of U.S. Catholics said the next pope should change church policies to allow priests to marry, while 25 percent of all Americans and 36 percent of Catholics said they preferred no change.

Most Americans, 64 percent, said women should be allowed to become priests, and 60 percent of the surveyed American Catholics agreed in the poll. Thirty-two percent of Americans in general disagreed, 38 percent of Catholics.

"Celibacy of priests is an issue that should be gone, priests should be able to marry," said Joseph Riess, a self-employed businessman and Catholic from Vienna, Va. Riess said he had mixed emotions about women priests.

Although such revolutionary changes seem unlikely soon for the tradition-bound church, some within the clergy say they may be inevitable, especially with the Vatican hard-pressed to enlist new priests.

"There are very few things that are absolutely unchangeable," said the Rev. Lawrence J. Madden, a Jesuit priest and director of the Georgetown Center for Liturgy in Washington.

Madden pointed out that more than 2,000 parishes out of nearly 20,000 do not have priests to offer Sunday Mass, a prospect that worries Catholics who consider receiving the sacrament of communion a critical element of their lives.

"The danger is we become a Eucharist-less church. I cannot see justifying that," Madden said. "People have their head in the sand."

In the survey, 37 percent of Americans and 41 percent of U.S. Catholics said the next pope should come from Europe while 36 percent of Americans and 43 percent of Catholics said the cardinals should choose a pontiff from Africa or Latin America, the fastest growing areas for Catholics.

The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,001 adults was taken Friday to Sunday and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

[joe]

I think it is great the Liberals care so much about who is elected Pope. They have a knack for being disappointed.

[Randy]

David, if it is at all possible I'd love to see you get a guest from one of these orthodox Catholic organizations being featured on Fox.

Catholic Answers, The Coming Home Network, The St. Paul Center, Catholic Resource Center, Franciscan University.

Folks like Jeff Cavins, Mark Brumley, Marcus Grodi, Scott Hahn, Rosalind Moss (she would be especially interesting given her Jewish background), James Aiken or others.

Hearing any of them comment on the coming conclave would be very interesting.

[David]

Will attempt to do that Randy. Was just watching O'Reilly. He had on this goo goo from USF talking about poverty and "Social Justice" being the cause of terrorism. Whoever is the next Pope needs to clean house at places like USF.
Weekly Standard
SOURCE
The Washington Post and the Pope
The Post tells us why John Paul II was a failure.
by Jonathan V. Last
04/03/2005 6:30:00 PM


THE WASHINGTON POST'S COVERAGE of Pope John Paul II today featured on page 1, among other things, a news "analysis" by Hanna Rosin. It had a promising title, "His Legacy: A Papacy and Church Transformed." Yet by the fifth paragraph of her 2,000-word piece, one got the impression that Ms. Rosin doesn't think much of John Paul II's legacy:

For those who expected more from the modernization--American priests ordained in the 1960s, say, Catholic women who wanted to be priests or Latin American leaders who wanted a partner in revolution--the pope not only betrayed his promise but locked the church in place for years to come.

The idea that there was a "promise" that the Pope "betrayed" shows such an ignorance of the basic character of the Catholic Church and such a fanciful understanding of what any Pope could or would have done, that one wonders what she has in store for the late pontiff.

Indeed, here's what comes a short way later:

Another challenge came in Latin America in the mid-1980s with the rise of liberation theology. The pope considered this movement a misguided Marxist revival and did not try to hide his impatience. On tours through Nicaragua and El Salvador, he lost his temper with crowds, yelling "Silencio!"

But let's take a look at the "Silencio" event in El Salvador which Rosin describes, as detailed by George Weigel in his biography of the Pope:

Father Tucci had arrived in Managua a few days before the Pope's arrival, along with Piervincenzo Giudici, a senior Vatican Radio engineer and an expert in sound systems. Giudici had gone to check the papal Mass site and came back shocked. A second sound system--new, powerful, and independently controlled--had been installed. . . .

In the pre-visit negotiations, [Marxist Archbishop] Montezemolo had insisted that the park be divided into sections and that the sector in front of the altar be reserved for representatives of Catholic associations and movements. When these representatives arrived at the site at 4 A.M., they discovered that the central front section had already been packed with Sandinista supporters, as had virtually all the space near the altar. The people for whom the Mass was being celebrated were corralled far to the rear of the venue, and police fired automatic weapons over the heads of those who tried to get closer to the altar.

Just beside the papal altar was another platform, filled with members of the government and senior Sandinista Party members. Their behavior was less than devout. During the Mass, all nine members of the Sandinista National Directorate, including Daniel Ortega, waved their left fists and shouted "People's Power!" The confrontation became more dramatic during the Pope's sermon. The Sandinistas had secreted microphones into the sector immediately in front of the altar platform, now full of their supporters. Those microphones and the microphones on the altar platform were controlled by Sandinista engineers, using the "emergency" sound system that had been installed days before. . . . When [John Paul II] reached the point where he explained the impossibility of a "Popular Church" set over against the Church's legitimate pastors, the Sandinista mob in front of the altar became raucous and tried to drown him out. The local engineers turned down the Pope's microphone and turned up the volume on the microphones that had been placed among the agitators. As this was going on, the government officials on the tribune next to the altar platform continued to misbehave. At last, an angry John Paul had had enough, and shouted over the mob, "Silencio!" A measure of order was finally restored, although at the end of the Mass the Sandinista chief of protocol went to the engineering console and demanded that the Sandinista anthem be played as a recessional hymn. John Paul stood at the front of the platform, took his crucifix-topped crosier by its base, held it high over his head, and waved it back and forth in salute to the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguan Catholics who had been kept penned at the back of the venue.

Weigel's account not only adds an awful lot of context to Rosin's; it shows that the truth is the opposite of what Rosin is trying to signal to her readers. (Perhaps Rosin discounts Weigel's reporting because he is, in her words, a "neoconservative.")

Or perhaps Rosin is merely building towards her rhetorical conclusion about John Paul II. As she concludes her piece:

To the Catholics who felt betrayed by how little he changed the church, his popularity was a kind of trick, the thing that most reminded them of the gap between what he appeared to be and what he was. "Because of his travels and television, he may have more prestige than any pope in history," said McBrien. "But he has very little influence on the lives of Catholic lay people. They see him and cheer for him. But there's not much substance" in his effect on them. . . .

In the end, though, he could not win over everyone, and his tenure ended for him with many disappointments.

He left his beloved Europe cold to his charms, more secular than ever. He left America more adoring than faithful. His evangelization of the Third World had only limited effect. But maybe he found spiritual fulfillment in his disappointments. The example of Jesus teaches nobility in suffering, so perhaps the pope's leadership can ultimately be measured not only by its accomplishments but also by its scars.

So it turns out the Pope's legacy was not "A Papacy and Church Transformed." His papacy was basically a failure, according to Rosin. The attempt to rewrite history and diminish John Paul II has arrived right on schedule. It would be worrisome if it weren't so pathetic.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard and a contributor to the blog

[David]

CBC is reliably Leftist

CBC waits an hour; then trashes Pope
by Arthur Weinreb, Associate Editor, Canada Free Press
Sunday, April 3, 2005
SOURCE
Pope John Paul II passed away at 2:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on April 2. Just a little over an hour later, CBC posted a story on its Web site entitled, "Former Nun slams PopeÂ’s views on women, contraception".

The posting dealt with details of what former nun, Joanna Manning had previously told CBC Newsworld. Manning, who was described as a co-founder of Catholic Organizations for Renewal, criticized the Pope for trying "to re-establish the traditional virtues of women as being humble, subordinate and nurturing." Manning was further quoted as saying that the "new doctrine of femininity" that Pope John Paul II had introduced into the Church was "quite dangerous in the effects that it can have on womenÂ’s lives." She further criticized the Pope for not listening to people, being against women in the priesthood and for using his power at the United Nations to prevent women from getting access to contraception and AIDS prevention. ManningÂ’s comments were summarized by describing his treatment of women and children as being "a terrible legacy that he leaves and one which the next pope will have to change".

Now Manning is of course entitled to her views and the CBC is right to air different viewpoints. But posting ManningÂ’s interview within minutes of the PopeÂ’s death was unbelievable and shameful, even for the CBC. Canadians, whose tax dollars fund the network should be outraged at the lack of compassion shown not only to the countryÂ’s Roman Catholics, but to all those who are saddened at the death of Pope John Paul II.

A perusal of news headlines on Google News from the time of the PopeÂ’s death until Sunday morning reveal only one other article, out of the hundreds that have been posted, that deals with the Pope in a negative fashion. Swissinfo ran a Reuters article entitled, "Women critics say pope left them out" that basically made the same point that Manning had made. At least the Swiss publication waited until the next day to publish the article.

Although the CBC is running the same continuous coverage on Newsworld as other media are and this was just one story out of many, the network just couldnÂ’t wait to go negative on an aspect of Christianity. The Pope was not above criticism and his legacy will be discussed and debated in the months and years to come. But an hour after his death was not the time to do it. That should be obvious even to the CBC.

The CBC just couldn’t wait to push their pro-feminist, anti-Christian agenda. The Pope may, as some have predicted, be referred to in the future as John Paul the Great. But to the CBC, he will be as he has always been — just another one of those white guys.

[David]

Just when I thought it couldn't sink to a lower level. Here comes the Leftist Guardian -UK.

The Pope has blood on his hands

The Pope did great damage to the church, and to countless Catholics
SOURCE
Terry Eagleton
Monday April 4, 2005
The Guardian

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.

· Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University

[David]

Typical ABC coverage
MRC
SOURCE
ABC: Pope "Controversial," "Too Conservative"
for U.S. Catholics

ABC's Peter Jennings ABC seemed ahead of the other networks in looking at Pope John Paul II's legacy through the prism of American liberals who see him as too conservative by U.S. political standards. Before he even passed away, ABC's Peter Jennings insisted that the Pope "was, of course, controversial here. Some American Catholics have chaffed at his insistence that they follow the Church's traditional social doctrines." Dean Reynolds cited "abortion, birth control, women priests" as issues which have "all driven a wedge between the Vatican and America." Less than two hours after ABC News reported the Pope's death on Saturday afternoon, anchor Bob Woodruff told Archbishop Wilton Gregory that "many believe" the "Pope has been too conservative socially for many Catholics in the United States." Woodruff soon pressed Father Richard McBrien of Notre Dame about the Pope's stands on "women in the priesthood, birth control and so on." O'Brien scolded the media, recalling how "every time the Pope made a visit to the United States...the media would pull out the usual suspects, you know, abortion, birth control, ordination of women, clerical celibacy."

ABC's concerns were raised by the other networks, but not so soon or eagerly it seemed from my viewing of the massive coverage over the weekend.

Jennings set up an April 1 World News Tonight story: "He's an electrifying figure for Americans, whether you were Catholic or not. People know that. He made seven trips to this country as the Pope. He actually went to Alaska twice. He was, of course, controversial here. Some American Catholics have chaffed at his insistence that they follow the Church's traditional social doctrines. But every time the Gallup organization asked Americans who are those people they admire most, John Paul always made the top ten list. And that admiration and affection was very clear today in many corners of America. Here's ABC's Dean Reynolds."

Reynolds aired a series of positive comments from American Catholics before cautioning, as taken down by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth: "John Paul's likeness adorns the walls of St. Hyacinth's Basilica in this heavily Polish Chicago neighborhood, where they talk of the Pope's 1979 visit to the city as if it were yesterday. And yet, the sea of vacant pews even on this day and in this Polish church points up a problem for Catholics in this country."
Father Richard McBrien, University of Notre Dame Theology Department: "There are a lot of achievements of the pontificate of John Paul II. But there are a lot of problems that are left for his successor."
Over an on-screen list titled, "Issues for American Catholics," which cited "Abortion, Birth Control, Women Priests, Sexual Abuse Scandal," Reynolds asserted: "Abortion, birth control, women priests, the list of contested issues is long, not to mention the priest sex abuse scandal. And it's all driven a wedge between the Vatican and America, regardless of the Pope's standing in the world."
McBrien: "For the vast majority of Catholics and for the vast majority of other people, the Pope was just an icon, a celebrity, a figure that they could applaud and then they could go home and do what they wanted."

The broadcast networks broke in on Saturday, April 2, just before 3pm EST to announce the Pope's death and while CBS stayed on the air for barely 30 minutes and NBC News for nearly 90 minutes, ABC News kept going for two hours with Bob Woodruff anchoring. After about a minute into ABC's coverage, however, viewers never again saw Woodruff as ABC stuck to live video from the Vatican and tape of of the Pope.

In its last half hour, a bit past 4:30pm EST, Woodruff talked by phone to Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta. Woodruff proposed that there is a "sense that there has been a great deal of loss of Catholics, Catholics leaving the church in the U.S. and there are, many believe, Archbishop Gregory, that perhaps this particular Pope has been too conservative socially for many Catholics in the United States. Is that your sense? Is that the sense that many American Catholics have in leadership?"
Gregory responded: "First of all, Bob, I would say that socially, the Pope was extraordinarily progressive, that he's very much involved with the shaping a social, a moral social vision that would be much more progressive than perhaps many Catholics were familiar with. Doctrinally, he was very traditional. So perhaps the area of disagreement would not be with a social teaching but with his doctrinal tradition."
Woodruff followed up: "In terms of questions of birth control, in terms of questions of women in the priesthood, those types of issues is what I think many Catholics have taken issue with with John Paul II."
Gregory: "Well, the holy father, I believe, from the moment that he assumed the chair of Peter, felt that he had to teach, that he had to build on the tradition of the church. And I think for some people they were looking for a break from the tradition. That's just not the nature of Catholicism. The nature of the church is that we build on the apostolic foundations and move forward. And I think that will have to be the posture of whoever assumes the chair of Peter after him."

Ten minutes later ABC brought aboard, via satellite, Father Richard McBrien of the Notre Dame Theology Department, though viewers only saw him in a small inst in the upper left of the screen over historic video of the Pope.

Woodruff introduced him: "I want to bring in Father Richard McBrien...to talk about the Pope's legacy, I guess you could say, in the United States, what he has left behind in terms of how he has affected the Catholic church and membership in the Catholic church in the United States. Father?"
O'Brien: "Well, it may come as a surprise to say that he didn't affect it very much at all. He visited us several times and made a very, very positive impact. He drew many crowds, many people were uplifted by it, by these visits. But in actual fact, when you look at the bottom line, there was no visible or observable result one way or the other. But that's not to dismiss the importance of those pastoral visits, it's simply to be a bit more realistic about some of the attributes, some of the virtues that are attributed to this pope. He was a great pope, no doubt about it, but we have to be careful about inflating some of the accomplishments and, therefore, in the process, undermining the credibility of the claims that are really legitimate and lasting."
ABC Woodruff pressed his favorite theme: "But it's not so much -- I'm not talking about the pastoral visits, the visits of the Pope, the charismatic appearances in front of American crowds, but really more doctrinally, the Pope's positions on things, as we mentioned before, women in the priesthood, birth control and so on. That affect on American Catholics is, really, I think, the more important question."
O'Brien took a shot at the media's agenda so well reflected by Woodruff: "As you know, every time the Pope made a visit to the United States, they identify -- the media, and I'm not dismissing the media's role or importance, but the media would pull out the usual suspects, you know: abortion, birth control, ordination of women, clerical celibacy. Those were the issues that were discussed prior to, during and after his visit..."

Indeed, the MRC has documented that media obsession on all of the Pope's trips to the U.S. since the late 1980s. We've already dug the material out of the MRC's archive, and at an appropriate time in the coming days we'll distribute evidence of the media's hostility to the Pope's views.

[David]

The best writer alive, Mark Steyn sets them straight. London telegraph

Why progressive Westerners never understood John Paul II
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 05/04/2005)
SOURCE
If I were Pope - and no, don't worry, I'm not planning a mid-life career change - but, if I were, I'd be a little irked at the secular media's inability to discuss religion except through the prism of their moral relativism. That's why last weekend's grand old man - James Callaghan - got a more sympathetic send-off than this weekend's. The Guardian's headline writer billed Sunny Jim as a man "whose consensus politics were washed away in the late 1970s". Is it possible to have any meaningful "consensus" between, on the one hand, closed-shop council manual workers demanding a 40 per cent pay rise and, on the other, rational human beings? What would the middle ground between the real world and Planet Zongo look like? A 30 per cent pay rise, rising to 40 per cent over 18 months or the next strike, whichever comes sooner?

By contrast, the Guardian thought Karol Wojtyla was "a doctrinaire, authoritarian pontiff". That "doctrinaire" at least suggests the inflexible authoritarian derived his inflexibility from some ancient operating manual - he was dogmatic about his dogma - unlike the New York Times and the Washington Post, which came close to implying that John Paul II had taken against abortion and gay marriage off the top of his head, principally to irk "liberal Catholics". The assumption is always that there's some middle ground that a less "doctrinaire" pope might have staked out: he might have supported abortion in the first trimester, say, or reciprocal partner benefits for gays in committed relationships.

The root of the Pope's thinking - that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to - is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in play, and by "consensus" all we're really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it'll be something else - it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block?

We live in a present-tense culture where novelty is its own virtue: the Guardian, for example, has already been touting the Nigerian Francis Arinze as "candidate for first black pope". This would be news to Pope St Victor, an African and pontiff from 189 to 199. Among his legacies: the celebration of Easter on a Sunday.

That's not what the Guardian had in mind, of course: it meant "the first black pope since the death of Elvis" - or however far back our societal memory now goes. But, if you hold an office first held by St Peter, you can say "been there, done that" about pretty much everything the Guardian throws your way. John Paul's papacy was founded on what he called - in the title of his encyclical - Veritatis Splendor, and when you seek to find consensus between truth and lies you tarnish that splendour.

Der Spiegel this week published a selection from the creepy suck-up letters Gerhard Schröder wrote to the East German totalitarian leaders when he was a West German pol on the make in the 1980s. As he wrote to Honecker's deputy, Egon Krenz: "I will certainly need the endurance you have wished me in this busy election year. But you will certainly also need great strength and good health for your People's Chamber election." The only difference being that, on one side of the border, the election result was not in doubt.

When a free man enjoying the blessings of a free society promotes an equivalence between real democracy and a sham, he's colluding in the great lie being perpetrated by the prison state. Too many Western politicians of a generation ago - Schmidt, Trudeau, Mitterrand - failed to see what John Paul saw so clearly. It requires tremendous will to cling to the splendour of truth when the default mode of the era is to blur and evade.

The question now is whether His Holiness was as right about us as he was about the Communists. The secularists, for example, can't forgive him for his opposition to condoms in the context of Aids in Africa. The Dark Continent gets darker every year: millions are dying, male life expectancy is collapsing and such civil infrastructure as there is seems likely to follow.

But the most effective weapon against the disease has not been the Aids lobby's 20-year promotion of condom culture in Africa, but Uganda's campaign to change behaviour and to emphasise abstinence and fidelity - i.e., the Pope's position. You don't have to be a Catholic or a "homophobe" to think that the spread of Aids is telling us something basic - that nature is not sympathetic to sexual promiscuity. If it weren't Aids, it would be something else, as it has been for most of human history.

What should be the Christian response? To accept that we're merely the captives of our appetites, like a dog in heat? Or to ask us to rise to the rank God gave us - "a little lower than the angels" but above "the beasts of the field"? In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), the Pope wrote: "Sexuality too is depersonalised and exploited: it increasingly becomes the occasion and instrument for self-assertion and the selfish satisfaction of personal desires and instincts. Thus the original import of human sexuality is distorted and falsified, and the two meanings, unitive and procreative, inherent in the very nature of the conjugal act, are artificially separated."

Had the Pope signed on to condom distribution in Africa, he would have done nothing to reduce the spread of Aids, but he would have done a lot to advance the further artificial separation of sex, in Africa and beyond. Indeed, if you look at the New York Times's list of complaints against the Pope - "Among liberal Catholics, he was criticised for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception" - they all boil down to what he called sex as self-assertion.

Thoughtful atheists ought to be able to recognise that, whatever one's tastes in these areas, the Pope was on to something - that abortion et al, in separating the "two meanings" of sex and leaving us free to indulge in one while ignoring the other, have severed us almost entirely and possibly irreparably from traditional impulses, such as societal survival. John Paul II championed the "splendour of truth" not because he was rigid and inflexible, but because he understood the alternative was a dead end in every sense.

If his beloved Europe survives in any form, it will one day acknowledge that.

[Randy]

Interesting about seperating sex from procreation - I beleive that is the basis for the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception.

To my surprise, apparently this was the historic teaching of all Chrisitan denominations until 1930.

Before 1930 all Christian churches opposed contraception as an unnatural and thus impermissible interference with GodÂ’s design for human sexuality.

That changed when, at their 1930 Lambeth Conference, Anglicans began permitting the use of contraception on a limited basis; other denominations quickly followed this trend and accepted the secular sexual morality that was starting to flood the West even back then. Today no major Protestant church maintains the historic Christian teaching on this issue.

[David]

This is spot on. Pope is getting the "Reagan Treatment." Just marginalize him as a kindly elderly "fuzzball." Newsmax
SOURCE
Leftist Media: Pope Getting 'Reagan Treatment'

The late Pope John Paul II is allegedly getting the so-called "Reagan treatment" and the liberal media do not like it any more than they liked Ronald Reagan.

"Many critics argue that the media are doing now what they did when former President Ronald Reagan died in June: reducing a deeply controversial figure to a warm, grandfatherly caricature," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

One critic peddled the current - and dubious - media line that the pope was out step with members of the Church in the West.

"This is a church with declining priests, with declining nuns, with declining church attendance," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Inquirer. "This was a very conservative pope. Most of his Western flock was not with his program."

Like the overwhelming number of her mainstream media colleagues, Miss Jamieson failed to understand that the program she mentioned was not John Paul's but the 2,000-year-old dogma of the Roman Catholic Church that he or any other pope is powerless to change.

Another popular media fiction is that the pope was a "polarizing" figure who created needless divisions within the Roman Catholic Church - a notion that avoids recognition of the fact that the alleged polarization arose from his defending what his church defines as good against that which it declares to be evil.

Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer, a Web magazine about media coverage of religion funded by New York University's department of journalism and its Center for Religion and Media, adopted that line of attack.

"The reason we're getting sick of thinking about it is because this complicated story line is being reduced to a shallower level even than Ronald Reagan," he said. "The Pope was a figure of tremendous polarization. ... Now people are being asked to turn on a dime and consider him ... a mythic figure who had a simple and straightforward meaning."

Christopher Winner of United Press International, who the Inquirer noted covered both papal deaths in 1978, says the pope has been transformed in death into another one-dimensional cult celebrity. "The coverage to me is extremely manipulative. It's Hollywood coverage - it's celebrity coverage. It's uncritical. ... I'm not suggesting that he wasn't a remarkable figure - he was. But this is completely out of proportion."

Stewart Stehlin, described by the Inquirer as an NYU history professor familiar with the Vatican, disagrees that coverage has been uncritical and notes there is a natural tendency to speak well of the dead.

"I've read an awful lot where they would be laudatory but then say, well, he hasn't accomplished this, he was too strict on that. ... I would expect in a situation like this that most comments would be laudatory."

To the leftist media elite (who view Ronald Reagan - who, with the pope, brought Communism tumbling down - as an amiable dunce), John Paul is likely seen as a cranky old conservative wedded to outmoded doctrines who stood in the way of what they regard as human progress.

[PeteS in CA]

:shock: :shock: "goo goo" :shock: :shock:

Have you been listening to Lee Rodgers, David? It's one of his favorite words for "intelligent" liberals.

I hope the Cardinals have the sense to do the opposite of the "advice" of those who wish the Catholic Church ill. Are the libs mythologizing John XXIII's Papacy into some sort of Camelot-on-the-Tiber?