[trisham]

Actually, that was how I felt about JPII. He is known to have simply shrugged off the US as being out of control and beyond hope. JPII, despite our great hopes for him in 1979, did almost nothing to correct things in the Church here and did nothing about the US bishops until almost the very end, when a new nuncio was appointed. That nuncio started giving us some good bishops. But JPII was very much (too much, IMHO) into collegiality and prior to that did nothing in the face of poor performance or even defiance by bishops.

************

Agreed, although the author paints a discouraging picture of Pope Benedict. I didn't see a lot in the article that was encouraging, but perhaps it is simply my own bad attitude today.

[livius]

There are scads of articles out there in the press (Newsweek, for example) painting a discouraging picture of BXVI, but I think they actually have little substance Iand are to marginalize him by simply dismissing him. Newsweek criticized him for not travelling enough, for example; what’s “enough,” and where is it written that any Pope has to go globe-trotting?

BXVI proceeds in a very slow and deliberate way, but he does proceed. He built up the case very carefully in Italy, for example, having a special study on the Church, legislation, and natural law, and then issuing a paper, so that the Italian bishops could then declare that anyone who voted for same-sex “marriage” was violating Church teachings and thus excommunicated. He is very thorough, and I think we’ll see the same thing here when he turns towards the US. But we’re in a difficult situation, with many difficult “leaders,” and I think he has to proceed carefully and with confidence that what he is doing is iron-clad from a doctrinal and canonical point of view.