I was talking about the danger of hero-worship.... But if you want to believe I think the Pope is like Hitler, it's a free country, I can't stop you from twisting my words. Dear ultima ratio, I wasn't "twisting" your words, I was attempting to parse the meaning of what you wrote. Which seemed to be an attempt to compare the crowd-pleasing ways of Adolph Hitler with those of Pope John Paul II, and to find some ominous significance in the resemblance. In what other way can your message be understood?
Yes, hero worship can be a bad thing; we can turn a hero into an icon or an idol, and this is never a good or healthy thing. But on the other hand, heros can have enormous positive sociocultural influence -- not as objects of worship, but as role models. It has been said that one of the obvious features of American life today is that we no longer have heroes to look up to, to offer as models of character worthy of emulation to our children.
Plus I have to say that Hitler was never any kind of hero. He played a German public that wanted to be seduced and deluded like a violin. He killed off all the real heros he could find -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind. A true hero is always a source of order, not of disorder, disintegration, death....
If you found Threshold of Hope undecipherable, then maybe you need to pray for the light and grace to read it in the spirit in which it was offered. Just pray for the help you need, and try, try again. If you do, then I'm sure you'll have better luck next time. God bless.
Threshold of hope was written in liberalese: with perfumed words. You could read it a half hour at a time and feel good--but you wouldn't have the foggiest idea what it was saying after you put it down. Let me ask you: what was the Pope saying? Can you remember?
But my major reason for writing that post was to wake some Catholics up to reality. It is not good to idolize the pope to the extent of rationalizing away his deficiencies as a leader. But this is what Catholics do: they blame middle management, but not the boss. If we have a problem with lousy bishops and cardinals, then there is only one man to charge with this: John Paul II, that lovable old grandfather of a man. It is also on his watch that there has been a world-wide collapse of Catholicism in the West. He has not disciplined apostate bishops, he has elevated men to the cardinalate of very doubtful orthodoxy. No one else is responsible.
Cardinal Law is a man who allowed a priest in his diocese to act as an activist for NAMBLA, a priest he KNEW had raped a six year old boy. A thousand page dossier was on his desk on this guy--yet he covered up for him for two decades. You would think the Pope would be curious as to why this went on for so long--and at a minimum ask for his resignation. Granted the Pope is a kind man--but in this case, his kindness has been harmful to hundreds of Catholic kids.
There is a homosexual subculture that has not only been growing in the seminaries, but it is actually alienating straight young men who are serious-minded about the faith. How could this Pope not have known about this all this while? The same thing is happening in Europe and Australia. Yet things just drift on, with little or no change. It took the media to bring all this to the attention of the average Catholic. Most would not believe the truth--just as my family didn't believe me when I told them at first. To the average Catholic it's inconceivable that priests and bishops sometimes have LESS faith than themselves.