Posted on 04/05/2005 3:33:10 PM PDT by quidnunc
“How many divisions has the Pope?” sneered Stalin of Pius XII. Uncle Joe’s successors lived long enough to find out. John Paul II’s divisions were the Poles who filled the streets to cheer him on his return as pontiff to his homeland in the summer of 1979, and the brave men who founded the Solidarity union 18 months later, and began the chain of events that within a decade swept the Communists from power in Central and Eastern Europe and finally Mother Russia itself. One day we will know the precise combination of Bulgarian Secret Service, East German Stasi and Soviet KGB that lay behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the Holy Father. But you can see why they’d be willing to do it. By then the sclerotic Warsaw Pact understood just how many divisions this Pope had.
Twenty-six years ago, one young physics student summed up the hopes he and his compatriots had invested in that Papal visit in this simple declaration: “What I want to do is to live without being a liar.” The Soviet Union and its vassals were an empire of lies, and — while you can mitigate, as many Poles and Russians did, the gulf between the official version and grim reality with bleak jokes — living an epic lie day in day out is corrosive of human dignity. That Polish physics student had identified instinctively what would be the great over-arching theme of John Paul II’s papacy: as he put it years later in the title of his encyclical, Veritatis Splendor — the splendor of truth.
When it came to the splendor of truth in the western world, the Pope had a tougher sell. In an hilarious self-parody of the progressivist cocoon, on Saturday afternoon the New York Times website posted its obituary of John Paul II as follows:
“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.
-snip-
THE POPE'S DIVISIONS
“How many divisions has the Pope?” sneered Stalin of Pius XII. Uncle Joe’s successors lived long enough to find out. John Paul II’s divisions were the Poles who filled the streets to cheer him on his return as pontiff to his homeland in the summer of 1979, and the brave men who founded the Solidarity union 18 months later, and began the chain of events that within a decade swept the Communists from power in Central and Eastern Europe and finally Mother Russia itself. One day we will know the precise combination of Bulgarian Secret Service, East German Stasi and Soviet KGB that lay behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the Holy Father. But you can see why they’d be willing to do it. By then the sclerotic Warsaw Pact understood just how many divisions this Pope had.
Twenty-six years ago, one young physics student summed up the hopes he and his compatriots had invested in that Papal visit in this simple declaration: “What I want to do is to live without being a liar.” The Soviet Union and its vassals were an empire of lies, and – while you can mitigate, as many Poles and Russians did, the gulf between the official version and grim reality with bleak jokes – living an epic lie day in day out is corrosive of human dignity. That Polish physics student had identified instinctively what would be the great over-arching theme of John Paul II’s papacy: as he put it years later in the title of his encyclical, Veritatis Splendor – the splendor of truth.
When it came to the splendor of truth in the western world, the Pope had a tougher sell. In an hilarious self-parody of the progressivist cocoon, on Saturday afternoon the New York Times website posted its obituary of John Paul II as follows:
“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 from teaching in Catholic schools because of his liberal views…”
Etc, etc, etc, detracting away all the way to the foot of the page. Given that the press had been dying for John Paul to die for days, to the point where many papers were running the Pope’s-life-in-pictures specials while he was still alive, you’d think by the weekend the Times would have had the basics covered. But no. The pontiff’s many “detractors” were all lined up and ready to go, but, despite over a billion Catholics in the world and millions of evangelical Protestants throughout America who also admire him, the paper somehow failed to notice till the last minute that they’d overlooked something - “NEED SOME QUOTE FROM SUPPORTER”. That’s as memorable a line as The New York Times will publish this year: they should nominate it for a Pulitzer. (Since they probably won’t, the eagle-eyed chaps at the Powerline website who spotted it have preserved it for posterity.)
As for the “passion” of the Holy Father’s “detractors”, that had the soothing drone of bien pensant autopilot: “Among liberal Catholics, he was criticized for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception…”
Shocking: a Pope who’s opposed to abortion, homosexuality and contraception; what’s the world coming to? To the modern secular sensibility, truth has no splendor: certainly there is no eternal truth; instead, it’s eternally up for grabs. Once upon a time we weren’t cool about abortion: now we are. Soon we’ll be cool about gay marriage. And a year or two down the line we’ll be cool about something else that’s currently verboten.
When Governor Jim McGreevey announced last year he was stepping down, he told the people of New Jersey: “My truth is that I am a gay American.” That’s a very contemporary formulation: “my” truth. To John Paul II, there was only “the” truth. To the moral relativists, everyone’s entitled to his own – or, as the Governor continued, warming to his theme, “one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world.” That sappy narcissism is what the New York Times boilerplate boils down to: “abortion, homosexuality and contraception” is an alternative Holy Trinity for the church of the self. Whatever one feels about any of those topics, they seem a bizarre prism through which to judge the most consequential Pope in half a millennium, a man who unlike Pius XII was not swept along by the times but instead shaped them decisively. Given that “abortion, homosexuality and contraception” boil down to the prioritizing of sex as self-expression over everything else in the world, even as a criticism of Karol Wojtyla’s papacy the charge is shriveled and reductive, reflecting mostly the parochialism of western secularism.
When the Holy Father created new cardinals in 2003, he held one name back, keeping it secret or “in pectore” – “in the heart”, the words used for a cardinal in a state where the church is persecuted. Which country is it? Some say China, the great growth area for Christianity. Think of that: a Chinese cardinal providing one of the 118 votes for John Paul’s successor. Among liberal “Catholics” in Manhattan and Boston, the pontiff may be a reactionary misogynist homophobe condom-banner but, beyond those stunted horizons, he was a man fully engaged with the modern world and shrewder at reconciling it with the splendor of the eternal truth than most politicians.
Karol Wojtyla was the third longest-serving pontiff of all time, after Pius IX, Pope from 1846 to 1878, and the first Pope, St Peter, whose papacy lasted from AD 30 to the mid-60s. When you hold an office held by St Peter, you’re not operating on media time. The progressivists’ assumption is that gay marriage, like abortion, is inevitable, so the Pope might as well get with the programme. In that case, why bother with religion at all? The difference between the modern west’s Church of the Self and John Paul’s church is that the latter believes in the purpose of life. The Church of the Flavoured Condom, by contrast, believes that man is no more than the accumulation of his appetites, and so you might as well license them. Given what Aids has done to African mortality rates and what abortion has done to European demographics, John Paul II’s eternal truths look a lot more rational than those of the hyperrationalists at The New York Times. To Karol Wojtyla, truth is splendid and immutable: he proved his point in the struggle against Communism; one day the west will recognize that he got it right closer to home, too.
The Irish Times, Monday April 4th 2005
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Hard to pick a best line, but this is a contender: Given that “abortion, homosexuality and contraception” boil down to the prioritizing of sex as self-expression over everything else in the world, even as a criticism of Karol Wojtyla’s papacy the charge is shriveled and reductive, reflecting mostly the parochialism of western secularism.
He's so right ... what tiresome people - in the old days, people dug up their enemies' bones over the nature of the Trinity and the hypostatic union of the two natures of Christ. Homosexuality? Please, go read a book!
Here's my second choice for best line. As I like to say when people ask about all the children, "The future looks like ME!"
A Steyn bump
FMCDH(BITS)
Ronald Reagan and the Pope destroyed the Soviet Union! The NYT will NEVER forgive either for that event and will continue to disparage both at every opportunity!
It's a good writer who can make us LOL on such a serious topic, and that ability helps me stay sane.
FMCDH(BITS)
Well-put, nothingnew. He's like Ann Coulter (although not as hyperbolic) because even while you're howling with laughter, you recognize that he's right.
Why doesn't somebody put an end to this shameless personality cult over John Paul II. If he could speak now, he would say "every good thing that I have done in my life is a result of me dying to my desires and living for Christ. I am all humility in that any charisma I have is the charisma of the Holy Spirit." The masses of mourners will be mislead unless somebody leads them to Christ. Do you think anybody will get saved over his passing?
That's a good one, too.
Was anybody saved over Christ's passing?
We are commanded to be "the skin of Christ" in the world, to help Him draw all men to Himself.
You should ask if anyone will be saved by your living. You and I are also called to greatness.
Let's wear ourselves out for our brothers and sisters, as this great man did.
LOL
Of course. But every orthodox Christian already knew that. After all, it's pretty much there in black and white: "Apart from Me, you can do nothing."
The masses of mourners will be mislead unless somebody leads them to Christ.
I'm pretty sure most of them are mourning someone they think already led them to Christ.
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