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A staunch conservative?
I’ve said that the conventional—and wholly mistaken—view of JPII is that he was staunchly conservative. Someone just sent me a Jeff Jacoby column from March, 16, 2000 lauding the Pope for confessing the crimes and persecutions done in the name of the Church over the centuries, particularly attacks on Jews. “A staunchly conservative pope,” Jacoby wrote, “has done something revolutionary.” It didn’t occur to Jacoby that if the Pope did something revolutionary (and he did lot of things that were revolutionary), then perhaps he was not a staunch conservative after all. In fact, the notion that JPII was staunchly conservative was needed to legitimize every radical thing he did. Liberals do this all the time. In order to defend the policy of a liberal politician from conservatives criticism, they’ll say that it is really a “conservative” policy. Since the false claim of “conservatism” is the very means of legitimizing liberal and leftist politics, that claim must be punctured.
By the way, why is a liberal never referred to as a staunch liberal? Email entry |