Posted on 04/08/2005 7:30:22 AM PDT by dead
WHEN dramatising another historic death in Rome, starring another giant who'd bestrode the earth, Shakespeare had Mark Antony say, with solemn insincerity, that he'd come to bury the assassinated Caesar, "not to praise him".
Now it's the Pope's time. Having survived assassination in St Peter's Square, he died in comparative calm, to be buried in praise, much of it as coded and careful as Antony tribute to his friend. Few Australian critics have dared to speak out. Even ex-priest Paul Collins, that perennial thorn in the side of Cardinal George Pell, has been muted.
But with so much talk of the Pope's death, now is the time to talk about the Pope and death, of his record on the life and death issues of life, from the Holocaust to AIDS, from the war in Iraq to the electric chair.
His holiness was at his best on the endless tragedy of Christian anti-Semitism. As a Pole, with Auschwitz in the neighbourhood, he was well aware of the Vatican's role in two millennia of pogroms – and of his church's mephistophelian contracts with dictators Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Although John Paul II's expressions of regret to the Jews for so many centuries of Catholic condemnation were guarded and qualified, they were light years ahead of the evasions of his predecessors and earned him belated respect throughout Israel and the diaspora.
His church, however, seemed just as concerned about abortion as with the Holocaust. Obsessing over the life and death of the fetus, the papacy led the opposition to stem-cell research. And on John Paul's watch the abortion issue, particularly in the US, exceeded boiling point as Catholic zealots linked with Pentecostal terrorists in the bombing of clinics and the murder of doctors.
Similar passions erupted when the courts agreed to switch off the life support of a vegetative woman and conservative clergy, aided and abetted by the Bush administration, turned a human tragedy into a political circus.
This brawling between reactionary theology and secular consensus in a pluralist society was balanced, however, by the Pope's profound opposition to the death penalty. This despite its popularity with many of the same US Christians – the best-known being the born-again President – who stridently oppose abortion and any form of euthanasia. (Throw the switch but don't pull the plug!) It was the Catholic nun who has spent more time on death row than most convicted murderers, as crusader and friend to the doomed, who persuaded her boss to speak out more strongly on the issue. Sister Helen Prejean convinced the Pope to oppose the death penalty in any circumstances.
On the war in Iraq, the Pope again refused to budge. With George W. Bush's planned invasion failing to meet John Paul's criteria for a just war, the deaths of countless Iraqis could not be countenanced. The Pope said so loud and clear and often. Yet among the many Catholics of influence in the secular world who totally ignored their spiritual leader were local columnists Frank and Miranda Devine, Christopher Pearson and Gerard Henderson. It seems that on this all-important issue, John Paul was not infallible. That mantle was draped over the shoulders of Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard. Our Catholic commentariat took their spiritual guidance from them.
Not that the Pope's anti-war position bothered the President. Team Bush simply arranged for a photo-op of their boy with the ageing prelate. With heads close together, it looked as if Pope and President were murmuring in agreement. That was certainly the interpretation put on the images by Washington. It's hard to imagine more ruthless and cynical behaviour.
Where the Pope entirely fails the test on life and death, where one bad decision eclipses all else, is with the worst pandemic since the Black Death. Millions of men, women and born and unborn children are on the death row of AIDS. Denied that right to life, they've been condemned to deaths far crueller than anything the gas chamber or electric chair has to offer. Their deaths will be long and lingering, infinitely more agonising than the Pope's. A great many of them are in Africa, a continent where Catholicism is increasingly dominant. Many of them, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, could and should have been saved.
All it needed was for John Paul to change his policy on the condom. But he refused to consider it. The condom was wrong, he proclaimed, in any and every circumstance. This monstrous folly follows the Pope to his grave. And theirs.
Gee, and if they had followed the Bible and abstained from sex or gotten married and stayed faithful I guess they would not have AIDS to begin with. So somebody explain how this was the Popes fault?
How do these people think the Church can be faithful if it is not allowed to address the moral issues demanded in the Bible of her people???
So from this article is see we are to kill the babies and the defective living and bow down to the gay community and let women preach. Ok thanks for playing, but we get that every night on tv.
I strongly suspect Mark Morford is clicking his hooves somewhere, wagging his tail, and sharpening his pitchfork for a front-page hatchet job sometime next week.
The Pope said no condoms, so the UN promptly sent tens of millions of them to Africa. It hasn't stopped them from spreading diseases, or raping babies in the mistaken impression that that will somehow 'cure' them. Blaming the Pope for the failures of man is like blaming the moon for the sun shining. Its rather backasswards.
" Monogamy? Abstinence? Are you kidding?
God forbid the most logical solution to the AIDS problem(and many social problems too)would even be considered. "
It is not only the logical solution it is also the only that has been tried in Africa and has actually worked.
I am not even Catholic and I'd like to kick this guy's ass.
That's how evil works, IMHO.
*****
You have NO IDEA how evil works. You are watching for a monster and what you will see is an Angel of Light that takes the souls of men all in the name of religion, just by twisting the truth a tiny bit. You have no idea how deceived the world is. No idea.
You are going to LOVE the next Pope. He is a black man out of Africa and he will consume the minds of men. The world is going to LOVE him....he will do more to bring about a one world order and religion than any that preceeded him.
Can't you see the lines between religions disappearing?
There are no more Protestants (protesting ones) There is NO separation of church and state.......their tax exempt status (contract) ties them to the state and the state mandates what is preached from the pulpit.
Politics and religion crucified Christ..Politics (Beast)
religion (whore)
IF it were possible even the very elect of God will be deceived!! WAKE UP CHURCH!! Its going to look GOOD!!!
I'm not saying this to be mean, I am genuinely afraid for all sitting under these worldly man-made institutions thinking its the church, when God said, his church was living stones, not denominations.
Rev. 18:4..."COME OUT OF HER MY PEOPLE."
There is SO much coming...there is so much upon us. And only a remnant will have the eyes to see and the ears to hear what the spirit of the Lord is saying. The price for failing to search for truth will be souls.
HOW TRAGIC....how so tragic.
Yeah, silly Pope, imagine obsessing over millions of dead unborn babies.
"They never forgave him for opposing communism so vehemently and effectively."
Amen. In the topsy-turvy world of leftists, the axis of evil was Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. Hastening the collapse of the left's great utopian hope - the Soviet empire - was the unforgiveable sin.
Right--Uganda,I think. I hope it continues though,Uganda is having many internal problems like most of Africa.
The author is a moron.
Yes. Millions of non-Catholics are strictly obedient to all the teachings of the pope.
It's fun to build a straw man and knock it down.
Would the author also claim that ant-logger violence discredits the entire ecological movement, or does he only selectively apply his "principle" of tarring with a broad brush?
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