The passing of a Pope is not envisioned to generate a universal response such as we have witnessed recently, and this suggests to us that Pope John Paul II was a person for all people, and not the exclusive domain of Catholics. His numerous travels over a 25-year span to places difficult to locate on maps, but also to most seats of civilization, created strong sensitive bonds between he, the leader of the largest Christian community, and people of other religions and faiths. We must however reserve judgment as to this love-in having been transmitted to the Catholic Church as a whole.

 

Without diminishing the importance of the remarkable conquest of human minds and hearts by this frail elderly gentleman, we must nevertheless recognize that during his tenure as the principal voice of morality in the world, not enough was achieved in the settling of the political climate in Palestine, the most sacred of the world’s geography, the backyard of the Christ himself. No dissuasive rapport prevented George the Warrior Bush from decimating the people of Afghanistan and Iraq on a vendetta, and Serbian Catholics until stopped militarily were bent on the extinction of the Kosovo Muslims. Priests, not many but too many, who celebrated Mass every morning and heard peoples’ confessions, perpetrated degenerate sins, and many hundreds of thousands of African children continued to perish from hunger and diseases.

What could the Pope have done? Very little but perhaps more than he did. He most certainly could have realigned his and the Church’s priorities. To give this a Catholic spin, since he believed as does the Church, that unbaptized children cannot go to heaven, how much more could he have done with the Church’s vast material wealth to help save those African children? How much more influence could he have exercised worldwide by using the hammer of excommunication against unrepentant and persistent Catholic perpetrators of criminality, in an attempt to reduce their influence in their own closeted surroundings? As the world morality leader how much more public insistence should he have exibited in his disapproval of the American warring activities and their catalytic support of Palestine’s unrest? Could his timidity in these areas have had political ramifications, and if so, were these considered to be more important than their moral alternatives?

While all this was happening, the Church was intent on holding the line on abortions and the use of condoms. Could it not occur to them that, not only would the use of condoms help to negate the need for abortions in wealthier societies, but still looking at it from their own religious perspective, could it not curb the creation of more children destined to perish unbaptized, as well as millions of A.I.D. victims also doomed to unbaptized death?

The Catholic Church is well intentioned and in the annals of history, no other organization has been more beneficial to human kind. They are a large slow moving organization, and in a modern world, many of their own constituents are induced by the forces within society, to accept concepts and solutions which are not on the Church’s agenda for further review. We are reminded that this is a religion that is still struggling to determine whether the lesser sin is to murder or to divorce. Finally, they continue to stipulate that women would have needed to be born as men to be considered for equal status.

Popes are absolute rulers, and are democratically selected for as long as they manage to stay alive. They are, as we all are, subject to the afflictions and incapacities that nature reserves for the elderly, who too often believe that the past is the sole guardian of wisdom. Christ himself, died as a young man, but his ecclesiastic descendants judge that people of a younger age than themselves are not sufficiently mature to understand the values of Christianity. Perhaps if Christ were to offer his wisdom today, he might well disagree, and encourage Popes and Cardinals to take an early retirement, when it is clearly evident that their capacities have eroded, and his interests would best be served by someone in the prime of life, not unlike his own selections to serve as Apostles.

Paul Forest

polforest@aol.com