The article by Hitchcock points out a rationale to the Pope’s thought and actions, but what we may be witnessing is the emergence of the need for a pope who can respond to Islam, if such is possible.
Pius XII is not given high marks generally for responding to Nazism, although his private actions seem to be heroic. JPII did a good job confronting Communism and totalitarianism, it seems, in what turned out to be the end of the cold war era.
We too should not lose faith, for Christ said that He had already won the battle, and that Satan had been defeated. That is the clearest sense in which I can rationalize the advice to “be not afraid.”
As a child, I thought the greatest need for the world was to embrace Christianity and to live within its guidelines. I saw and still see an exploding world population where resources are getting scarcer, nations are struggling but few seem ready to adopt our own form of government which seems to work well enough for us (my naive point of view), and few people seem to grasp that we need to get along with one another.
In our own society, the contraception movement seemed to be the panacea for women’s liberation, even if the Catholic Church and others disapproved. But, we seem to have mentally shot way past that into the abortion-on-demand mentality – which seems to show the irresponsibility towards free sex and the lack of foresight to embrace contraception. In the popular way of thinking, contraception was supposed to liberate us (men and women) with a pill, but it didn’t. Few in public arenas discuss the apparent failure of this technology to save us, and our society has embraced the ultimate horror of killing the unborn, often in the stage of imminent birth.
Criticize the Pope? How high are our expectations of what this Pope or any Pope can do unless the remainder of the Church is with him. And, sadly, we know that in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere, people have decided to make up their own minds.
My own reaction to this Pope is that he has written a lot, but, if anything, I wish he had travelled more, especially to the U.S. to “roll out” his teachings on Christianity. What Hitchcock does not say is that the innovation of Vatican I was the emphasis on infallibility of the Pope. Vatican II continued to define the role of the Bishops in the church. And, you will note, JPII referred the sexual abuse problems back to the Bishops of the U.S. to a considerable extent. Recall, he condemned the abusive priests, calling them criminals, but referred back to them the problem of fixing the problem. And, for example, we have the zero-tolerance policy, which is not universally acclaimed. And, face it, we’re not mature enough to forgive / forget the priests who it seems were involved in a single adventure.
Why bash JPII when the Bishops (all of them) have stumbled so badly on war-and-peace issues, opposition to abortion, and the various aspects of the sex abuse scandals? The Bishops’ conferences seem to dwell on the minutiae of whether we should stand or sit or kneel during the Mass – and there’s little agreement there – and don’t seem to have a clue to deal with the power that they possess. They seem to lust for their own power too much to give in to an episcopal conference. And, well they should, given the conservative/liberal makeup of the group.
It’s not anti-Catholic to criticize the Pope OR the Church at large or the local national Church. methinks. I just (naively) wish we didn’t have to do that. Slamming the bishops in the national press seems, sadly, to be the only way to get their attention. That’s one of the first things they should fix.
And it happened during his pontificate. As did a number of cases early on, in