The Right and the Pope's Legacy: Willful Blindness
Out of respect for the dead, and for the man’s many positive accomplishments, we were going to hold off on any comment on the death of Pope John Paul II. There is no doubt in our minds that when the history of the Twentieth Century comes to be definitively written, the late Pope’s efforts against Communism and his obviously well-intentioned and heart-felt work to improve inter-faith relations will both be prominent. Along with President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, the Pope’s tireless efforts in favor of liberty and freedom of conscience bore concrete results readily visible in the modern-day reality of tens of millions of free men and women where once walked only slaves.
But the hagiography of recent days, especially among our friends at National Review Online, has served not only to praise the Pope but also to cover over his many shortcomings, especially as related to the Church in the United States. While such a reaction is understandable, especially among good Catholics like Kathryn Lopez, recent events have been such that only a willfully blind person could deny that there is something slightly desperate in the never-ending praise, especially insofar as it ignores two rather giant elephants in the sitting room.
The Left critique of the Pope has been on display for days now, as even the most casual glance at the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post verifies. Alone among the world’s great religions, the Western Left has been demanding that the Catholic Church—and not, say, Islam—accommodate its social and political preferences, and lamenting the fact that, basically, the Pope was never really the kind of guy people in Manhattan could relate to at a cocktail party. It’s all really as tiresome as it is pathetic and predictable; the depths to which the MSM is now plumbing is truly a world-historic moment and one we don’t think we’ll be seeing again anytime soon.
As usual, however, the Left and the MSM are so blinded by their own prejudices that they’ve missed the big story, much as their sick obsession with Pulitzer Prize-winning images of brutality and defeat have caused them to miss the phoenix-like rise of Arab democracy in the Greater Middle East generally and in Iraq specifically.
The first elephant is the strong and strident anti-Americanism of both the Pope and the Church in general. The Church is, at bottom, a European institution peopled by European intellectuals, all well-schooled in the typically European anti-American narrative. So, it’s not such a surprise to find the Church at the forefront of the vaguely Left critique of American as the Source of All Evil due to its ungodly worship of money, sex and power.
However, this Pope took that stereotype and made a cottage industry of it. In almost all his major pronouncements, Europe and its cynical secularism are mentioned only obliquely, if at all, while not-so-subtle code words for American-style capitalism feature prominently as oppressors of the world’s poor and downtrodden.
The run-up to the Iraq War saw the Pope and his Church not only stake out a radically anti-American position, but the Pope himself treated known genocidal maniac and butcher “Vice President” Tariq Azziz as an honored guest and provided a platform for this most Christian of Saddam’s henchmen to criticize the President of our country as a blood-thirsty madman. Let us not avert our eyes: this Pope said a Holy Mass with and prayed with Azziz as a political gesture to embarrass and harm the United States of America and its President.
As the Leftists are keen to point out—ever-addicted as always to charging hypocrisy—this part of the Pope’s legacy is strangely absent from conservative commentary on his death. In fact, if one were to only read the conservative papers, magazines and websites one would be hard-pressed to find anything mentioning the Pope’s strident anti-Americanism in this regard. This is unfortunate, as the Church is, singularly, the most important pan-Western institution; to surrender it to knee-jerk and unthinking anti-Americanism in the name of a misplaced sense of decorum or loyalty is both tactically and strategically unwise. Friendly criticism would not hurt and is not disrespectful.
The second elephant is the Pope’s and his Church’s wholly inadequate, debasing and insulting reaction to the plague of pedophile priest scandals that have wracked the American church.
Spare us the emails regarding how numerically insignificant the number of actual pedophile priest incidents are compared to the number of parish priests and/or their collective good works: the fact of the matter is that we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that high level officials of the Church shielded and protected their brethren that they knew were involved in one of the most sickening examples of betrayal of trust and office that we can think of.
One can engage in wishful thinking on this topic all one wishes; but the cold reality is rows upon rows of empty pews and legions of disillusioned and distraught Catholics from Portland, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts.
Not only has the Church not punished those most responsible by virtue of both official and personal responsibility, the Church has gone out of its way to demonstrate to Americans that it does not care very much that its people raped and brutalized children and did nothing about it.
The inclusion in the ceremonies in the Vatican of disgraced Archbishop of Boston Bernard Cardinal Law is nothing less than a spit in the face to concerned Americans in general and concerned American Catholics in particular. The man should no longer be a priest, let alone given such a vaunted and honored position.
With regard to the larger scandal, let us just add that the Church is very lucky we were not in a position of prosecutorial authority during the worst of the scandals. If the conclave of American Bishops thinks the “secular” world of law enforcement has been a bit rough on them, they certainly would not have liked what we would have had in store. In fact, given their high place in our social structure and their trusted positions, it is a wonder to us that law enforcement has been so deferential towards the Church. Shouldn’t we have a special obligation to exact punishment from those given so much in terms of power and position who abuse it? Is not their transgression the greater due to their offices?
Why the Catholic Church is so intent on antagonizing the only religious country left in the Western World is one of the great mysteries of the age, but we suspect is has more than a little to do with the Church’s latent anti-Americanism.
One of the Left’s greatest fault in the inability to self-criticize. In the face of these two over-whelming issues left by John Paul II, we refuse to engage in the same form of willful blindness. The Pope’s morally reprehensible cozying to the worst barbarians of the Saddam Hussein regime and his shameful silence and inaction in the face of one of the worst crises to strike the American Catholic Church are a part of his legacy, like it or not.
Only by engaging and criticizing do we stand any chance of correcting those errors and strengthening what is by any measure one of the great pillars of Western Civilization.
But the hagiography of recent days, especially among our friends at National Review Online, has served not only to praise the Pope but also to cover over his many shortcomings, especially as related to the Church in the United States. While such a reaction is understandable, especially among good Catholics like Kathryn Lopez, recent events have been such that only a willfully blind person could deny that there is something slightly desperate in the never-ending praise, especially insofar as it ignores two rather giant elephants in the sitting room.
The Left critique of the Pope has been on display for days now, as even the most casual glance at the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post verifies. Alone among the world’s great religions, the Western Left has been demanding that the Catholic Church—and not, say, Islam—accommodate its social and political preferences, and lamenting the fact that, basically, the Pope was never really the kind of guy people in Manhattan could relate to at a cocktail party. It’s all really as tiresome as it is pathetic and predictable; the depths to which the MSM is now plumbing is truly a world-historic moment and one we don’t think we’ll be seeing again anytime soon.
As usual, however, the Left and the MSM are so blinded by their own prejudices that they’ve missed the big story, much as their sick obsession with Pulitzer Prize-winning images of brutality and defeat have caused them to miss the phoenix-like rise of Arab democracy in the Greater Middle East generally and in Iraq specifically.
The first elephant is the strong and strident anti-Americanism of both the Pope and the Church in general. The Church is, at bottom, a European institution peopled by European intellectuals, all well-schooled in the typically European anti-American narrative. So, it’s not such a surprise to find the Church at the forefront of the vaguely Left critique of American as the Source of All Evil due to its ungodly worship of money, sex and power.
However, this Pope took that stereotype and made a cottage industry of it. In almost all his major pronouncements, Europe and its cynical secularism are mentioned only obliquely, if at all, while not-so-subtle code words for American-style capitalism feature prominently as oppressors of the world’s poor and downtrodden.
The run-up to the Iraq War saw the Pope and his Church not only stake out a radically anti-American position, but the Pope himself treated known genocidal maniac and butcher “Vice President” Tariq Azziz as an honored guest and provided a platform for this most Christian of Saddam’s henchmen to criticize the President of our country as a blood-thirsty madman. Let us not avert our eyes: this Pope said a Holy Mass with and prayed with Azziz as a political gesture to embarrass and harm the United States of America and its President.
As the Leftists are keen to point out—ever-addicted as always to charging hypocrisy—this part of the Pope’s legacy is strangely absent from conservative commentary on his death. In fact, if one were to only read the conservative papers, magazines and websites one would be hard-pressed to find anything mentioning the Pope’s strident anti-Americanism in this regard. This is unfortunate, as the Church is, singularly, the most important pan-Western institution; to surrender it to knee-jerk and unthinking anti-Americanism in the name of a misplaced sense of decorum or loyalty is both tactically and strategically unwise. Friendly criticism would not hurt and is not disrespectful.
The second elephant is the Pope’s and his Church’s wholly inadequate, debasing and insulting reaction to the plague of pedophile priest scandals that have wracked the American church.
Spare us the emails regarding how numerically insignificant the number of actual pedophile priest incidents are compared to the number of parish priests and/or their collective good works: the fact of the matter is that we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that high level officials of the Church shielded and protected their brethren that they knew were involved in one of the most sickening examples of betrayal of trust and office that we can think of.
One can engage in wishful thinking on this topic all one wishes; but the cold reality is rows upon rows of empty pews and legions of disillusioned and distraught Catholics from Portland, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts.
Not only has the Church not punished those most responsible by virtue of both official and personal responsibility, the Church has gone out of its way to demonstrate to Americans that it does not care very much that its people raped and brutalized children and did nothing about it.
The inclusion in the ceremonies in the Vatican of disgraced Archbishop of Boston Bernard Cardinal Law is nothing less than a spit in the face to concerned Americans in general and concerned American Catholics in particular. The man should no longer be a priest, let alone given such a vaunted and honored position.
With regard to the larger scandal, let us just add that the Church is very lucky we were not in a position of prosecutorial authority during the worst of the scandals. If the conclave of American Bishops thinks the “secular” world of law enforcement has been a bit rough on them, they certainly would not have liked what we would have had in store. In fact, given their high place in our social structure and their trusted positions, it is a wonder to us that law enforcement has been so deferential towards the Church. Shouldn’t we have a special obligation to exact punishment from those given so much in terms of power and position who abuse it? Is not their transgression the greater due to their offices?
Why the Catholic Church is so intent on antagonizing the only religious country left in the Western World is one of the great mysteries of the age, but we suspect is has more than a little to do with the Church’s latent anti-Americanism.
One of the Left’s greatest fault in the inability to self-criticize. In the face of these two over-whelming issues left by John Paul II, we refuse to engage in the same form of willful blindness. The Pope’s morally reprehensible cozying to the worst barbarians of the Saddam Hussein regime and his shameful silence and inaction in the face of one of the worst crises to strike the American Catholic Church are a part of his legacy, like it or not.
Only by engaging and criticizing do we stand any chance of correcting those errors and strengthening what is by any measure one of the great pillars of Western Civilization.
