This may be just a little off-topic, but I’ve heard so much from certain quarters regarding Pope John Paul - someone on the CA forums even had the temerity to judge him a “terrible pope”. I can’t be quiet any longer. These people claim to want to return to the pre-Vatican II Church, but in pre-Vatican II days, no Catholic would have had the audacity to criticize even the parish priest, much less the pope. Whatever validity there might otherwise be to anything they say is completely invalidated by their hubris. They are weakening the unity of the Church, not strengthening it, and that is NOT the work of the Holy Spirit.
Do you think John XII, who gave land to his girlfriend, murdered a number of people, and was himself killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife was not a bad pope?
My point, you see, is that to state that the very notion of evaluating a pope is sinful isn’t really logical. In the “pre-Vatican II days”, when the majority of Catholics actually knew and lived their faith, most were aware that under certain circumstances - public heresy, apostasy - it’s charitable, holy, and morally
required to correct superiors.
I’ve also long found it ironic that all those who condemn those who criticize the state of the Church are implicitly siding against the Pope. By this I mean that John Paul II was completely orthodox, and Benedict is completely orthodox, and part of the modernist agenda against both has been a denial of the papacy as an institution as defined by Christ. The modernists have long taught that the Pope is just another bishop and does
not have universal authority. As I’ve said several times in this forum, the disgusting behavior of bishops I saw in public and defiant disobedience to John Paul II certainly contributed to my outlook on the whole situation. I realize some are still not aware of these things.
As bad as the sedes are on these topics, those who cannot be convinced that something did go terribly wrong in the post-V2 church are, well, just as bad in another way, I would say.
To switch gears: I happen to think that John Paul II was, in most regards, an incredible man and Pontiff and assuredly a saint.
He gave of himself to the core throughout his papacy, not just John Paul II against the world, but John Paul II against the
churchmen, those many bishops who so resented this antiquated Pope for daring to orthodox (the alternative they would have liked being too horrible to contemplate).
He may have done a few questionable things and he may not have done much of anything to prevent the downward slide of the Church he presided over, but we can’t know why. We can’t know what he knew that we don’t know. We can’t know what he never knew because it was kept from him. What I mean is: do you excommunicate disobedient clerics if it means causing a schism? Those are the kind of weighty questions he had to ponder.
In
Goodbye, Good Men, Michael Rose talks about the evaluation of American seminaries John Paul II ordered when he got wind of the rampant unorthodoxy and homosexual behavior that was overrunning them. Rose describes the deception engaged in by these seminaries, replacing their new-age/Protestant/heterodox reading material with Papal encyclicals, etc. Basically, a complete charade put up by these people to fool the investigators. So, what did John Paul II actually know? What what
could he have done, anyway?
So, in any case, even if one would pick a bone with him over such matters, they are matters of governance. Personally, he was a completely orthodox Catholic, with a deep Marian devotion, of course. He often spent his off day hearing confessions and meeting with visitors for 12-14 hours. He lived his faith completely. He was absolutely instrumental in the fall of Communism and certainly risked his life in that regard. He was a loyal servant of Christ and certainly now enjoys his eternal reward.
room now…
Yup.
