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The Pope has blood on his hands
The Guardian (UK) ^ | 4/4/2005 | Terry Eagleton

Posted on 4/4/2005, 4:02:42 PM by 1066AD

The Pope has blood on his hands The Pope did great damage to the church, and to countless Catholics

Terry Eagleton Monday April 4, 2005

Guardian

John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory 60s were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of the early 70s began to bite, the western world made a decisive shift to the right, and the transformation of an obscure Polish bishop from Karol Wojtyla to John Paul II was part of this wider transition. The Catholic church had lived through its own brand of flower power in the 60s, known as the Second Vatican Council; and the time was now ripe to rein in leftist monks, clap-happy nuns and Latin American Catholic Marxists. All of this had been set in train by a pope - John XIII - whom the Catholic conservatives regarded as at best wacky and at worst a Soviet agent. What was needed for this task was someone well-trained in the techniques of the cold war. As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla hailed from what was probably the most reactionary national outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin Mary-worship, nationalist fervour and ferocious anti-communism. Years of dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Both institutions were closed, dogmatic, censorious and hierarchical, awash with myth and personality cults. It was just that, like many alter egos, they also happened to be deadly enemies, locked in lethal combat over the soul of the Polish people.

Aware of how little they had won from dialogue with the Polish regime, the bishops were ill-inclined to bend a Rowan-Williams-like ear to both sides of the theological conflict that was raging within the universal church. On a visit to the Vatican before he became Pope, the authoritarian Wojtyla was horrified at the sight of bickering theologians. This was not the way they did things in Warsaw. The conservative wing of the Vatican, which had detested the Vatican Council from the outset and done its utmost to derail it, thus looked to the Poles for salvation. When the throne of Peter fell empty, the conservatives managed to swallow their aversion to a non-Italian pontiff and elected one for the first time since 1522.

Once ensconced in power, John Paul II set about rolling back the liberal achievements of Vatican 2. Prominent liberal theologians were summoned to his throne for a dressing down. One of his prime aims was to restore to papal hands the power that had been decentralised to the local churches. In the early church, laymen and women elected their own bishops. Vatican 2 didn't go as far as that, but it insisted on the doctrine of collegiality - that the Pope was not to be seen as capo di tutti capi, but as first among equals.

John Paul, however, acknowledged equality with nobody. From his early years as a priest, he was notable for his exorbitant belief in his own spiritual and intellectual powers. Graham Greene once dreamed of a newspaper headline reading "John Paul canonises Jesus Christ". Bishops were summoned to Rome to be given their orders, not for fraternal consultation. Loopy far-right mystics and Francoists were honoured, and Latin American political liberationists bawled out. The Pope's authority was so unassailable that the head of a Spanish seminary managed to convince his students that he had the Pope's personal permission to masturbate them.

The result of centring all power in Rome was an infantilisation of the local churches. Clergy found themselves incapable of taking initiatives without nervous glances over their shoulders at the Holy Office. It was at just this point, when the local churches were least capable of handling a crisis maturely, that the child sex abuse scandal broke. John Paul's response was to reward an American cardinal who had assiduously covered up the outrage with a plush posting in Rome.

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.

· Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: analinterest; atheist; catholic; catholicbasher; classof04; condomobsession; conspiracytheories; eurotrash; fools; guardian; ingrates; johnpaul; kooks; leftwingkook; liberal; litcrit; mediaviewpoint; poland; pope; popehater; radicalleftists; socialists; terryeagleton; tinfoilalert
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A different view, has one valid point (Cardinal Law) but overall I don't agree with it. I think John Paul did a great job overall.
1 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:02:43 PM by 1066AD
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To: 1066AD

Terry Eagleton is a brilliant literary critic but a Marxist.


2 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:04:13 PM by Borges
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To: 1066AD; Admin Moderator

PLEASE!

Could we at leat wait until the man is buried before we start with the pope bashing!!
gezzzzzzzzzz


3 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:04:48 PM by kellynla (U.S.M.C. 1st Battalion,5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Div. Viet Nam 69&70 Semper Fi)
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To: Borges

I didn't think it was a long night with Ronnie and Margo in office, actually I thought it was quite short.


4 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:05:21 PM by Waterleak (I pity the fool)
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To: 1066AD
" the western world made a decisive shift to the right"

Road apples.

(How I wish that were true.)

5 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:05:49 PM by BenLurkin (O beautiful for patriot dream - that sees beyond the years)
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To: 1066AD

Leftists can't even wait until he is buried before they attack.


That is vicious....and sad.


6 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:06:01 PM by TomGuy (America: Best friend or worst enemy. Choose wisely.)
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To: kellynla

Dittoes to that.


7 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:06:04 PM by RushCrush (Requiem in pacem, Karol Wojtyla.)
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To: 1066AD
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.

Maybe they should have listened to the Pope and tried abstinence. Another liberal/marxist blame-anybody-but-the-perpetrator comment.

8 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:06:29 PM by cinives (On some planets what I do is considered normal.)
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To: 1066AD

The honeymoon lasted about 2 days until the leftists came out with their knives to start carving him up.


9 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:06:57 PM by randita
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To: 1066AD
1000 years hence, more than a billion people will be asking that John Paul II pray for them. His life story will be the subject of many sermons each year on his feast day and his theology will be a source for many scholarly inquiries and discussions.

1000 years hence, Terry Eagleton will have been erased from human memory.

10 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:06:57 PM by wideawake (God bless our brave soldiers and their Commander in Chief)
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To: 1066AD

The left's Pope-bashing begins in earnest.


11 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:06:59 PM by MisterRepublican
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To: Borges

If he's a Marxist, then how can he be considered "brilliant"?


12 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:07:06 PM by JoJo Gunn (More than two lawyers in any Country constitutes a terrorist organization. ©)
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To: JoJo Gunn

His 'Intro to Literary Criticism' is indispensible to students of the subject.


13 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:07:48 PM by Borges
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To: 1066AD
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.

Yeah right I am sure those involved in illicit sex( mainly homosexual) didn't use condoms cause the Pope told them not to

If this guy ain't smokin weed he ought to cause he needs a brain alteration
14 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:07:49 PM by uncbob
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To: 1066AD
This article seems a little teensy weensy left wing? Not to mention penned by a non-christian?
15 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:07:58 PM by Kelly_2000
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To: Borges
Terry Eagleton is a talentless hack literary critic and also a Marxist.

His only contribution to the field is a shallow survey of other people's ideas.

16 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:08:00 PM by wideawake (God bless our brave soldiers and their Commander in Chief)
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To: 1066AD

The only part I can even remotely accept is the part about condoms. Not for AIDS, since that is preventable without condoms, but for married women in developing countries whose lives are at risk from quick succession pregnancies and poor medical care during birth.


17 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:08:20 PM by pa mom
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To: 1066AD

In a just society, Terry Eagleton would be writing her column in a dungeon somewhere with Tomas de Torquemada there to check her grammar and punctuation.


18 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:08:27 PM by B-Chan (Catholic. Monarchist. Texan. Any questions?)
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To: 1066AD

"...just as the emancipatory 60s were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. "

That's all I had to read to know that they're whiney embittered comunists upset that they aren't in control.


19 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:08:47 PM by Darksheare (MONSOON 2005, coming to NY near you! "I survived the monsoon!")
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To: JoJo Gunn
If he's a Marxist, then how can he be considered "brilliant"?

Brilliantly evil?

20 posted on 4/4/2005, 4:08:50 PM by Osage Orange (Short CYTC..............)
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