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Monday, April 04, 2005

Pope John Paul II

I've elsewhere written about how radically profound was Pople John Paul II's vision of global economic justice. I love him for making such a vision the official social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

But it must also be asked: has anyone in history ever done more to justify, if not foster, sexism and homophobia?

And since the Church spent far more time on the no-woman-priests, anti-gay issues, on balance the Pope's legacy is at best mixed.

PS to right-wingers: As the CIA itself predicted long before the fact, the Soviet Union would have economically and politically collapsed all on its own, without the Pope or Reagan.

Here's an additional take on the Pope's legacy from a professor in England:

The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was neither his part in this cover up nor his neanderthal attitude to women. It was the grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned - as a 'culture of death' - condoms, which might have saved countless Catholics in the developing world from an agonising Aids death. The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his hands. He was one of the greatest disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin.

Actually, possibly Pope John Paul II's greatest crime was his destruction of liberation theology in the Third World, a destruction which makes far less likely the radical global economic justice he so movingly wrote about and made an official part of church social doctrine.

Jack Clark 10:01 PM [+]   
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