No Free Ride for Pope John Paul II

Everyone seems to be in a lock-step zombie state. Shhhh…do not say anything against Pope John Paul II…don't offend the 25% of Americans who have convinced themselves he was decent and good in spite of evidence to the contrary. Hey! Wake up! Democrats gave George W. Bush a free ride about Iraq in order not to offend Republicans. When it was deemed the period of mourning had passed regarding the WTC bombing and therefore it was okay to oppose the GOP war strategies, it was too late. The GOP got a free ride on the Schiavo case because it seemed inappropriate to trample on a family's grief. The GOP chose to exploit the Schiavo family's dilemma into a full-blown media blitz in order to advance the far-right-religious opposition to pro-choice views. No more free rides. Let's get this straight. Pope John XXIII was decent and good. But Pope John Paul II has set the Roman Catholic Church back a hundred years. He made the decision himself to act in the capacity of a world politician rather than as a holy man. And his troglodyte policy against the use of condoms to fight AIDS condemned millions of Africans to death. Denying millions of people a simple means for avoiding a deadly disease was immoral. The antediluvian stance of Pope John Paul II on stem cell research, on gays, on women in the church, on a woman's right to her own body have made many Roman Catholics leave the church. He promoted these issues on the world stage of politics. He chose to be a political force rather than a voice of religious compassion. Pope John Paul II had to be dragged into making a statement about the irrefutable evidence of pedophilia among priests. At first he said it was an American problem, which he obviously didn't want to touch with a verger's pole. Finally he said that pedophilia was a societal problem and that priests were no more prone to it than the society as a whole. In other words, if the Catholic Church had enabled priests to bugger little kids, it had nothing to do with the Papacy. Pope John Paul II was a stubborn, intransigent politician. He maintained that all people in a persistent vegetative state should be kept alive by artificial means. But he didn't commit the Roman Catholic Church to paying the hospital bills for these heroic measures. That amounts to an unfunded mandate and unfunded mandates are immoral. Pope Pius IX slipped one over everyone in the world when he convened Vatican I and in 1870 had popes declared infallible. And why are they infallible? Because everything done in the Vatican has God's seal of approval. No matter what it is, the Cardinals and the Pope are who they are which means God has ratified whatever they do and say. In essence, they are saying, We say God speaks through us...what're you gonna do about it? Tell the truth, that's what. Starting now. Today. No Free Rides. The next Pope is going to be a clone of Pope John Paul II because that's how he set it up. But that doesn't mean we need to make life easy for him.