I think that the word “apostate” is going a tad far but your point is well taken. He really did go way too far in the mindless ecumenical direction. Kissing the Koran and saying nice things about VooDoo really sends the wrong message in this mixed up world of ours.
To my mind the really big reason not to rush to judgement on the sainthood issue is that JPII presided over decades of priestly sex abuse of children and did nothing about it. He sure appears to me to have been part and parcel of the Church’s coverup of child abuse. He didn’t do much to clean up the “pink” seminaries in the States and Ireland, either.
And let’s keep in mind as well that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (used to be called the Holy Inquisition) that had jurisdiction over such matters.
I freely recognize JPII’s astonishing accomplishments. And it wasn’t just his courageous and pivotal role in the defeat of the USSR. JPII also pushed through the Catechism, which was urgently needed, not to mention a complete updating of the Canon Law. His towering personality was a tremendous force in world evangelization.
But we shouldn’t rush to judgement. The fact remains that untold numbers of kids, mostly young boys, had their lives ruined and their souls polluted by priest-perps - including a couple of guys close to me - while JPII sat on his hands at best.
“To my mind the really big reason not to rush to judgement on the sainthood issue is that JPII presided over decades of priestly sex abuse of children and did nothing about it.”
So says you.
Pope John Paul II was elected to the papacy in late 1978. Child molestation by priests in the United States peaked in 1980 or 1981. Abuse had declined by 90% by the early 1990s.
It is true that the scope of prior abuse didn't become public to the last few years of his pontificate, but it's very, very clear that someone in the Church took the problem in the United States very seriously and began to turn the problem around very early in Pope John Paul's pontificate.
Who knows? Perhaps the pope even had something to do with it.
We don't really know what happened behind the scenes to cause the dramatic decline in priestly sex abuse starting early in Pope John Paul's pontificate. We cannot say that he did nothing about this problem. We really don't know.
There isn't really any evidence to support your assertion, and what evidence we have suggests that perhaps the late pontiff WAS doing something about the problem.
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