A Global Champion Of All of Humanity

NY Newsday ^ | October 15, 2003 | Seth Armus

[presidio9]

In the quarter century of Pope John Paul II's papacy, three moments stand out for me.

First, his 1983 visit to Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega's Sandinistas, having won over an element of the Catholic clergy, hoped John Paul could be manipulated into defending the government and their "popular" church.

Mistaking the pope's humanism for socialism, and accustomed to weak and corruptible Catholic leaders, Ortega attempted to turn a religious service into a Communist pep rally. The pope told him, in effect, to shut up and stop desecrating the mass. Guest of the Marxist Sandinistas, he was nonetheless the eternal messenger of Jesus.

The second occurred 10 years later, at World Youth Day in Colorado. Addressing a half-million young followers in what the press quickly dubbed a "Catholic Woodstock," the pope, after wallowing in mutual good-feeling, told the audience that America is too materialistic and selfish and, more pointedly, that all of our nation's great accomplishments will be meaningless if we continue permitting abortion.

And the final example is his personal outreach to Jews. He stopped those within his own Polish church who wished to "Christianize" the Holocaust, and he also prayed for forgiveness at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial. He then angered many Jews by pushing for the canonization of Edith Stein, a woman murdered at Auschwitz for being a Jew, but whom some Catholics want to transform into a "Christian martyr."

These three instances contain the fundamental contradictions of John Paul's papacy: An instinctively political man, he resists political classification. A leader with a great instinct for freedom, he mistrusts any movement based on man. And, finally, though a deeply cultured European intellectual, he has consistently moved the Roman Catholic Church toward its ecstatic and medieval roots.

[presidio9]

American Catholics, who want to love this pope without accepting his uncompromising opposition to the three issues that separate him from them: birth control, male celibate priesthood and homosexuality. If a schism occurs, it will be over these issues.

BTW, the Edith Stein misinformation annoyed me, but where did the author EVER get the idea that American Catholics as a whole do not accept his uncompromising opposition to homosexuality? Why does the buttsex crowd continually try to gravy train other movments? (see: Their bizarre metaphor of Stonewall for Rosa Parks).

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

In other articles, liberals credited the pope with being the man who "really ended the Cold War." Some of the same people who chortled at the notion of Ronald Reagan bringing down the Soviet empire seem to believe that John Paul did.

presidio9, I agree that this is a generally good article--but I my point in reply#4 to

From today's vantage point, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the discrediting of communism looks foreordained. But it certainly didn't look that way on October 16, 1978. Scarcely three years earlier Saigon had fallen to the North; a year later the Soviets would invade Afghanistan; Communist movements menaced Central America; and as [the anticommunist union] Solidarity grew in the Pope's native Poland so did the prospect of a Soviet invasion.

Roman Holiday
Wall Street Journal ^ | Thursday, October 16, 2003 | REVIEW & OUTLOOK

is not affected by it. The NY Newsday article doesn't begin to give the perspective that the WSJ piece does. A college student never exposed to the Cold War would get nothing of the serious nature of the threat of Communism in the years preceding his/her birth from the Newsday piece.