The Pope's death

Any comments on this? What do you think: was he a great man or not?

 

I find myself remarkably unmoved my his death. I'm not terribly well informed on what he did or didn't achieve but my general impression is that he didn't do a great deal for having lead the Catholic church for 26 years. He could, for example, have brought Catholicism out of the dark ages with some more enlightened attitudes towards contraception and abortion but all he did was bang the same old repressive drum. As far as I know he didn't do much for world peace, helping the poor or similar causes that a man in his position and with his power could have done. He talked a lot but didn't do much.

My peripheral interest in his death is only slightly greater because I recently read Dan Brown's "Angel's and Demons" (much better than "The DaVinci Code" btw) which covers the death of a sitting pope and the arcane "conclave" process of electing a new one - with a load of conspiracy theories thrown in of course

No doubt the death of JPII will fuel even more interest in the book.

To answer your question: No, I don't think the Pope was a great man. He wasn't a bad man by any means, but certainly not a great one either.

Michael.

 

as i'm not a catholic i don;t particularly believe he was my 'bridge to deity' and therefore my only feeling is the same as that for any other human being that has passed away.
hopefully the new pontiff will relax some of the attitudes towards contraception especially in the african countries where aids is rife as is catholic proselytization. i doubt their attitude towards abortion will change but as long as they aren;t militant about it, i couldn;t care less what they think.
it's interesting that the death of a bulemic divorcee caused more ruckus than the death of jp2.
cheers


julian

 

I am not catholic either, I was very drunk the other night and ended up in an irish club before going into town, it was anounced then the pope had died, I did manage to stand up for two minutes when completly drunk and I did think about the pope. However to me he is just another person who has died.

Of course I wouldn't wish death on anybody and it will be a loss for his freinds and family but his death is no loss to me personaly.

 

Well said sir! I'm glad people still decide to believe in blind faith when there's no evidence to support the 'book'.

 

Well, I'm no catholic either. In fact I am a pure blood atheist. But it is claimed that he was important concerning the death of 'communism' - just a bloody tyrant's dream - and that he was a charismatic person who brought christianity back to the fore. The later I think he did. For the rest... Of course he gave Solidarnosk his support - moral support, but can a pope give more than that?

I quite agree with Julian when he speaks about Ms. Spencer. But that's in England. In the Continent the Pope's death was perhaps more important than a starlet girl's death.

Anyway, please keep contributing. I do not really know what to think about this Pope. He was an honest man; he truly believed in God and in goodwill. And yet he is said to have furthered Opus Dei, an extreme right wing view of Catholicism. Was he gaga for the last ten years? Because it is hard to connect his kindness to liberation theology and his furthering of opus dei...

 

W/O doubt the Catholic faith's belief in non-contraception is causing problems in Africa, and it's time they tried to resolve that conundrum as they see it. He did I believe have a truly tragic background as a result of communisim, I remember reading about it, and he also supported Lek Walensa in his fight against the Polish authorities. He was definitely one of the component parts in the downfall of communism, but I don't think a particularly key one. I'm not sure that the Pope is that important to non-catholics, it's hard to ascribe relevance to someone who plays no part in your beliefs or life. Someone like Mother Theresa who can physically be seen to be doing good works is much more deserving of support. Although I read again some horrific things about the way her order behaved in India after her death. You can't believe what the media says all the time though. They were in my opinion responsible for the hysteria which followed Diana's death.

 

As a Protestant Belfastman, perhaps I shouldn't have an opinion on the Pope, but I do. Karol Wojtyla was a spunky guy. He stood up fearlessly to the Communists in his homeland. This didn't require as much fearlessness as it would elsewhere, as the Polish Party knew better than to interfere with the Church in such an ardently Catholic country. (It has to be remembered that, in Poland as in Ireland, the Church sided with the people, not with the government - the Catholic Church helped to keep the idea of Poland alive, for all the years when the place didn't even exist on the map - and has been rewarded with unusual devotion). Nevertheless, Archbishop Wojtyla stuck to his guns. He was also clearly a warm, approachable human being who inspired great loyalty.

However, he was also doctrinally extremely conservative, and he not only endorsed the Church's traditional stance on controversial questions, but he also packed the College of Cardinals with people who thought as he did (in his long reign, JPII has selected the entire current College). It is therefore highly likely that his successor will also be a conservative (any ordained Catholic priest can theoretically become Pope, but the last election from outside the College was over 300 years ago).

It has to be remembered that the Catholic Church's positions on doctrinal issues are usually traditional, and not at all Biblical. Clerical celibacy is NOT Biblical, and there were early Popes who were married. There is no Biblical teaching against contraception, or against women having a leading role in the Church (in I Corinthians, Paul mentions that the Corinthian Church had women "prophets" - what this actually means is not that they foretold the future but that they preached). However, the Catholic Church's position has always been that its traditions have equal validity to Scripture, meaning that these ossified positions will stay. However, the fastest-growing area of the RCC is in Africa and Asia - more than 50% of the world's Catholics are in those regions. Add to that the substantial Latin American contingent, and we can see that the RCC is becoming a Third World organisation with a European Head Office. The Third World will eventually have an effect, and it'll be interesting to see how. Africans tend to be more conservative than Europeans or Americans, but I wonder how long senior African clerics can keep their fingers in their ears.

I would say that, unlike John XXIII, who, in Tom Lehrer's memorable phrase, made the Church "more commercial", JPII was not a great Pope. The possibility for greatness was there, to sweep away some of the cobwebs from the RCC and make it relevant again to millions who have turned away from it, as did John XXIII. But JPII was forged in the fires of two tyrannies, Naziism and Communism, and such opposition makes one tend to adopt the diametrically opposite position and cling to absolute Church orthodoxy. Ironically, the thing that made JPII such an implacable and formidable opponent of Communism and led to his playing a central role in its downfall probably also led to his being unable to change with changing times. The next Pope will be an old guy, but almost certainly one lacking the political baggage of JPII. Perhaps he might surprise us. Somehow I doubt it.

 

He was? I thought he was dead against. I remember his chastising the priests who were members of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, after the overthrow of the appalling Somoza. (This was Somoza Jr. Somoza Sr. was the guy of whom Teddy Roosevelt famously commented, in a way that illustrates US foreign policy to this day, "I know he's a sonuvabitch, but he's our sonuvabitch!"

So, when did he change positions, RdS?

 

I was raised a catholic, the schools I went too were both quite strict in the teachings (primary school very much, it was in the same grounds as the church), my parents never pushed me at all, even though my mum was a nun (before meeting my dad of course) she no longer believes in the faith, my grandparents are very strong catholics and tried to push me in their direction. The pope was always the ultimate, the greatest man on earth, our bridge to god etc etc. Im a big bang follower so that kind of rules me out of heavenly things, but even at a young age I just found the whole catholic faith very ugly to say the least and didnt even get confirmed when I was 13. Even so I do feel abit touched by his death, strange really.

The pope could really have a big impact on the world, one billion followers, plus all other christian faiths all look to the pope for guidance but I cant see anyone of the cardinals taking moving the world on for the better.

All IMO.

 

No, we most certainly do NOT!

 

An interesting piece from today's "New York Times":

WITH the news media awash in encomiums to the indisputable greatness of Pope John Paul II, isn't it time to ask to which tradition he belonged? Partisans unfamiliar with Christian history may judge this a strange question. Why, they may answer, he belonged to the Catholic tradition, of course. But there is no single Catholic tradition; there are rather Catholic traditions, which range from the voluntary poverty of St. Francis of Assisi to the boundless greed of the Avignon popes, from the genial tolerance for diversity of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century to the egomaniacal self-importance of Pope Pius IX in the 19th century, from the secrecy and plotting of Opus Dei to the openness and humane service of the Community of Sant'Egidio. Over its 2,000-year history, Roman Catholicism has provided a fertile field for an immense variety of papal traditions.

Despite his choice of name, John Paul II shared little with his immediate predecessors. John Paul I lasted slightly more than a month, but in that time we were treated to a typical Italian of moderating tendencies, one who had even, before his election, congratulated the parents of the world's first test-tube baby - not a gesture that resonated with the church's fundamentalists, who still insist on holding the line against anything that smacks of tampering with nature, an intellectual construct far removed from what ordinary people mean by that word.

Paul VI, though painfully cautious, allowed the appointment of bishops (and especially archbishops and cardinals) who were the opposite of yes men, outspoken champions of the poor and oppressed and truly representative of the parts of the world they came from, like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who tried so hard at the end of his life to find common ground within a church rent by division. In contrast, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston rebuked the dying Cardinal Bernardin for this effort because, as Cardinal Law insisted, the church knows the truth and is therefore exempt from anything as undignified as dialogue. Cardinal Law, who had to resign after revelations that he had repeatedly allowed priests accused of sexual abuse to remain in the ministry while failing to inform either law enforcement officials or parishioners, must stand as the characteristic representative of John Paul II, protective of the church but often dismissive of the moral requirement to protect and cherish human beings.

John Paul II has been almost the polar opposite of John XXIII, who dragged Catholicism to confront 20th-century realities after the regressive policies of Pius IX, who imposed the peculiar doctrine of papal infallibility on the First Vatican Council in 1870, and after the reign of terror inflicted by Pius X on Catholic theologians in the opening decades of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this pope was much closer to the traditions of Pius IX and Pius X than to his namesakes. Instead of mitigating the absurdities of Vatican I's novel declaration of papal infallibility, a declaration that stemmed almost wholly from Pius IX's paranoia about the evils ranged against him in the modern world, John Paul II tried to further it. In seeking to impose conformity of thought, he summoned prominent theologians like Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff to star chamber inquiries and had his grand inquisitor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issue condemnations of their work.

But John Paul II's most lasting legacy to Catholicism will come from the episcopal appointments he made. In order to have been named a bishop, a priest must have been seen to be absolutely opposed to masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests and any hint of Marxism. It is nearly impossible to find men who subscribe wholeheartedly to this entire catalogue of certitudes; as a result the ranks of the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual incompetents. The good priests have been passed over; and not a few, in their growing frustration as the pontificate of John Paul II stretched on, left the priesthood to seek fulfillment elsewhere.

The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads. And there is no other solution for the church but to begin again, as if it were the church of the catacombs, an oddball minority sect in a world of casual cruelty and unbending empire that gathered adherents because it was so unlike the surrounding society.

Back then, the church called itself by the Greek word ekklesia, the word the Athenians used for their wide open assembly, the world's first participatory democracy. (The Apostle Peter, to whom the Vatican awards the title of first pope, was one of many leaders in the primitive church, as far from an absolute monarch as could be, a man whose most salient characteristic was his frequent and humble confession that he was wrong.) In using ekklesia to describe their church, the early Christians meant to emphasize that their society within a society acted not out of political power but only out of the power of love, love for all as equal children of God. But they went much further than the Athenians, for they permitted no restrictions on participation: no citizens and noncitizens, no Greeks and non-Greeks, no patriarchs and submissive females. For, as St. Paul put it repeatedly, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus."

Sadly, John Paul II represented a different tradition, one of aggressive papalism. Whereas John XXIII endeavored simply to show the validity of church teaching rather than to issue condemnations, John Paul II was an enthusiastic condemner. Yes, he will surely be remembered as one of the few great political figures of our age, a man of physical and moral courage more responsible than any other for bringing down the oppressive, antihuman Communism of Eastern Europe. But he was not a great religious figure. How could he be? He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church.

 

...and what else is the head of the Catholic Church to do? The Bible is clear cut (pretty much anyway) in its' teachings on adultery, sleeping around, marriage, contraception, abortion and sexuality. As the head of the Catholic Church, his job is to bash that Bible unfailingly, and that's that.

I was confirmed at 14, but only because I was pretty well forced to keep going to church as my mum's VERY Catholic and was very ill at the time. My dad now has terminal cancer, and this is just another nail in the coffin of why I've not believed in God since, oh, about 10 years old.

I'm a hypocrite for going to church, but will only do so until Dad's funeral. Once that's done, I'm telling my mum that if she thinks I'll worship a god who thinks causing pain like that on a good man, let alone all the thousands of others in the world enduring far worse, whilst allowing wars and bigotry and just-general nastiness to happen, she's SORELY mistaken. God "might have spared her" at least twice (she's had cancer twice, and has angina/diabetes), but it's man who came up with radiotherapy, anti-pnuemonia drugs and aspirin - you know, the things that have kept her alive - NOT God, just like it's man's ingenuity that gave me back my eyesight, and is keeping my mate with HIV alive. Of course, it's also man's greed that is allowing Africa and other places to go to rack and ruin due to crop failures, AIDS, and debt.

If we are made in God's image, then surely he's just as shitty as the rest of us, so worthy of contempt. Don't give me that old crap about man being weak - if man is, then God is. "Blasphemous rumours" by Depeche Mode is a pretty good summing up of my views on Dog.

As for JPII - well, he survived getting shot, so he was pretty "hardcore" in my book, but not someone to neccessarily be lionized; as the head of one of the most oppresive faiths ever devised, it's not something to celebrate really, is it?

BTW - Protestants for one DEFINITELY do NOT recognise the Pope! Nor do they recognise the transfiguration of god into water and wine (IIRC). As far as I understand it, the God is the same, but the "manegerial structure" up to him isn't.

 

No, that's not that. You didn't study your Church too well, did you, Dom? The Bible is only one pillar of RC belief, not the only one - the traditions of the Church have equal sway, and many Catholic beliefs are based on that tradition, and not on the Bible.

The technical term is "transubstantiation". Remember Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag"?

Get in line with that processional
Step into that small confessional
There the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original
If it is, try playin' it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two-four-six-eight
Time to transubstantiate!

As good a comparison as any I've heard. We Prods don't actually need a management system - we can go straight to The Boss, with no need for middlemen (or middlewomen!).

 

Sorry tones, no offence I more meant he was a figure for the christian faith in general.

 

None taken, ol' bean. And, no, he still isn't a figure for the Christian Church in general. Can't imagine the Orthodox Churches signing up for that any more than the Prods.

 

Sorry T-bone, the Pope is only a figure for the Catholic church, no-one else recognises his alleged divinity or whatever it is he has. Brought up as a proper proddy, and rejecting it by the age of 10! I know all about how some people preach about false idols and all the rest.
The Christian tag merely means follower of Christ, so under that umbrella could come your Methodists, your Lutherians and all manner of other churches, not one of whom would have any recognition of the Pope other than as head of his church, an archbishop of Canterbury for Catholics if you will!

 

Infallibility, when he pronounces ex cathedra on church doctrine. (He apparently gets the football pools and the 3.15 at Epsom just as wrong as everyone else). This doctrine is very recent, basically ramrodded through the first Vatican Council in the late 1800s in a fit of pique by the then Pope (Pius IX or X, I think) at having lost all the Papal lands to the newly-unified Italy. The sulks with Italy continued until 1929 and the Concordat between Mussolini and Pius XI, which established the Vatican City as an independent sovereign state.

 

Speaking as an ex Catholic, I'll think you'll find that there is a large proportion of the Catholic church membership who see the Pope as neither infallible or divine (that would after all be idolatry) and are also aware of the history. He is certainly well respected, but again it isn't universal. You don't need to be too smart to get a tad cynical about the idea of an infallible pope who seemingly only became infallible less than 150 years ago and even then after considerable resistance from within the Church itself.

If Popes are infallible by divine fiat then the Popes must have always been infallible and not just suddenly become infallible in the 19th Century - in which case the Church could never in any part of its history have changed its mind, about anything which it clearly has. The Renaissance Popes become a little hard to explain away as well if you insist on infallibility.

Most reasonably educated Catholics are likely to look on the infallibility thing as a piece of late 19th c. politrickery and an embarassment. Either that or its something they try not to think about too hard.

If Catholics took everything the Pope said 100% seriously, Europe would currently have double the population it has.

 

Speaking as another ex-Catholic, IMO the problem was/is that the Pope took what he said seriously, and that far too many Catholics accept(ed) the doctrine of Papal infallibility without a) understanding the historical background or b) appreciating the limits to such infallibility. Perhaps the birth-rate in some Third World countries wher Catholicism has a presence is more indicative of the problem than the birth-rate in Europe.