Editorial: US bishops, please suppress the cult of St. John Paul II

[Polak]

Editorial: US bishops, please suppress the cult of St. John Paul II | National Catholic Reporter

I know for most of us here the National Catholic Reporter isn’t a viable source for Catholic news, but I do try to keep the habit of reading a wide range of Catholic media, including NCR from time to time, because it’s useful to know what kind of information other Catholics are being fed.

While a lot of content from the National Catholic Reporter website disturbs me, this recent plea for US bishops to suppress the cult of John Paul II is beyond the pale, but obviously not beneath them. Many liberal minded pro-LGBT Catholics have never been keen on JPII, because of his reinforcement of Church teaching in areas of marriage and the traditional family. He basically didn’t ‘budge’ on these issues, and that bothered them. Trying to insinuate that he knowingly accepted sexual abuse and should therefore not be considered an honourable figure, is downright disgraceful. ‘Oh the snakes’ was my first thought when I saw the title on their page.

Here is a snippet from the article if you don’t wish to read it in full.

This man, proclaimed a Catholic saint by Pope Francis in 2014, willfully put at risk children and young adults in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and across the world. In doing so, he also undermined the global church’s witness, shattered its credibility as an institution, and set a deplorable example for bishops in ignoring the accounts of abuse victims.