A reader’s thoughts on JPII

VFR reader Jeff Geatches writes:

After watching several hours of TV over this weekend “analyzing” the Pope’s death I was muttering to myself regarding all the distortions. Reading your pieces just now was so refreshing. I am not a Catholic and consider much of Catholic teaching and tradition heretical but I still want a “good” Pope from the perspective of Christianity and the West. The older I have gotten the more Pope John Paul II has struck me as a politician and salesman first and a theologian second. Though he worked within the respectable trappings of Roman Catholicism, his content seemed more comparable to Kenneth Copeland’s or Benny Hinn’s than Thomas Aquinas’s. JPII just seemed to make it up as he went along. He decried Communism but, other than the state sponsored atheism, was largely in agreement with that system. This included his endorsement of multiculturalism, “social justice,” nationlessness, and coercive wealth redistribution to name a few. He always seemed to give liberalism freely from his right hand though he withheld some things to keep the appearance of a conservative; your discription of him being neoconservative is apt. His moral equivalencies between the murder of the innocent and both capital punishment and nationalism rendered his other pronouncements of dubious value. He may have possessed a command of multiple languages and packaged himself well but his thoughts were largely vacuous. I would say first and foremost he was a reactionary. He was shaped more by his revulsion of Nazism and Communism than love of anything. Yes, he loved humanity in a material sense but how could he love them in a spiritual sense when their souls were destined for hell by not having a personal relationship with Jesus? There was a bit on TV about the jewish conductor of the Vatican’s symphony orchestra. This conductor (and the liberal interviewing him) raved about the Pope’s strengthening his faith as a Jew. The Pope didn’t witness to him; the Pope only said he was glad the conductor had faith in something. Like you said, that is pantheism motivated by humanism, not Christianity.

Christianity has become so effeminate and passive in its current public manifestation that it is no longer the defender of the West but a co-conspirator in its very destruction. The New World Order makes strange bedfellows. I don’t think there is much hope that the next Pope will reverse JPII’s trend. Quite the contrary, the next Pope will almost surely push it along faster and win the praise of the Left by supporting more progressivism in both the world and the church. This weekends coverage showed me nothing but the public mouthpieces of the RCC seeking the praises of this world. Too bad they didn’t seem so interested in showing us to the narrow gate that leads to the next.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 04, 2005 06:56 AM | Send