Dear Nicholas Kristof: Take Off Your Blinders

This morning, Nicholas Kristof's Op/Ed column in the New York Times is headlined “The Pope and Hypocrisy”. I thought, Aha! Someone finally is going to address the fact that the people who are eulogizing Pope John Paul II are hypocrites. Or, at the very least, that the Pope with his pious words about “culture of life” is a hypocrite. But no. Kristof says, “The message of the pope's ministry was about standing up to evil, not about holding grand funerals.” Kristof went on to write about a 16-year-old girl in the Sudan who was raped by three men, then kicked out of her home and rejected by her fiancé because she had been “disgraced and spoilt”. When she was eight months pregnant from this rape, the police came to her home, took her to the police station, beat her and jailed her for the crime of having been raped. Kristof says, “John Paul wanted world leaders to show compassion for suffering people like these girls….” What a load of crap. I don't know what Kristof means when he says, “show compassion”. I don't think he knows what he means. The Pope was great at giving lip service to the concept of compassion. But what action did he ever take to right the wrongs caused by bigotry and religious zealots? What did he do or cause to be done about the genocide in Sudan? Say the girl in Sudan was a girl in the USA. Say a 16-year-old girl was raped by three hoods in Houston, TX and she became pregnant from the rape. Say she and her boyfriend had intended to get married after graduating from high school. What would the Pope's stance on this situation have been? The teenaged girl would have to carry the rape-pregnancy to term. She could put the baby up for adoption or she could raise the baby herself. That's it. That's the Pope showing compassion. I have never understood how the Roman Catholic Church aims for the world to deal with every woman on this planet having a baby every year of her childbearing life. The RC's happy-face vision of womankind is that she is celibate until she marries at the age of 22. If she's fully menopausal at the age of 50, she could produce 28 blessed events during her life…oh happy, happy days. But for the sake of argument, let's say she has 20 babies. What about educating and feeding these children? I have not heard that the Vatican has issued an encyclical detailing how to educate and feed the 20 babies that every woman on earth will bear when the RC Church runs the world. However, the Church does have an answer when a woman says she doesn't want to have a baby every year. The RC gives her three choices: 1) Have a baby every year because the Pope says so. 2) Cease having marital relations a) Not a realistic option because a woman has the wifely duty to engage in sexual relations. b) Oral sex is not a realistic option because it's okay only if it leads to “regular intercourse”. 3) Use the RC-sanctioned rhythm method of birth control which doesn't work All options lead to Rome: Have a baby every year. The Pope said that giving condoms to Africans as a means of stopping the scourge of AIDS would be morally wrong. And, according to the Pope, the only way homosexuals can be welcomed into the arms of Jesus and the Catholic Church is for them to be celibate. During his Popedom, when priests molested little children, John Paul II sanctioned the protecting of pedophile priests rather than protecting little children from these psychopathic criminals. If there is any compassion in the Pope's culture of life, I fail to see it.