[BlackElk]

The new Springtime of the Church or whatever will occur exactly when God sees fit, not one minute sooner or later, and most certainly not as a result of the constant carping and complaining and nitpicking directed at JP II by these pipsqueaks. I am personally acquainted with both Woods and Ferrara and I can assure you that each is exactly the kind of preachy, self-obsessed, sort of personal attention getter that we do not need to be led by. It is a shame because each is talented but they are putting their talents to work for nonmeritorious purposes. So far, I have resisted getting their book. If I feel mugged into getting it to attack it and them, there will go many more hours which will be spent here instead of elsewhere.

They can go to hell in their own respective and particular handbaskets. That's one thing. The scandal they give is another. The Remnant is also, btw, fond of a particular breed of ahistoric antiAmericanism which is, on the right, the equivalent of San Francisco Democrats like Ms. D'allesandro Pelosi. In the Remnant it is Solange Hertz and John Rao who are the enthusiastic worshippers of all things they imagine as European and, therefore, ohhhh so superior to anything so benighted and low rent as to be American.

We also need not have growing schism. They attack the pope. They attack the Church. No volume of self-serving denials will diminish that fact.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Of course, they are not perfect. But they are not good either since their stock in trade is unwarranted and persistent attempts to discredit this truly remarkable pope. Those who disagree with the incredibly insightful them are written off as neoCatholics or post-conciliar Catholics (wouldn't that be anyone baptized since the council or admitted to the Church since then as Woods was?). This mirrors the obnoxiousness of the constitutional fantasists and isolationists that anyone with a foreign policy and supportive of military effort where necessary must be a "neo-conservative."