The Pope is dead

Pope John Paul II Dies at 84

FOX NEWS, April 02, 2005: Pope John Paul II, the bold, humanitarian leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has died. He was 84 years old. As the very end drew near, the pontiff refused to be taken to a hospital and instead spent his final hours in the papal apartment in Rome.

The operative word above is “humanitarian.” Unfortunately, the description is all too true. The Pope is not supposed to be a “humanitarian.” He is supposed to be Christ’s vicar on earth. Was Jesus Christ a “humanitarian”? Was Paul a “humanitarian?” Was Peter a “humanitarian”? So why should a Pope be a “humanitarian”?

Karol Wojtyla was a magnificent, gifted, and deeply devout man. But intellectually he was, to a disastrous degree, a product of twentieth century thought. His cult of humanistic personalism, his ecumenism, his thinning out of Christian truth for popular consumption, his constant reaching out to the secular world, to Moslems and to other non-Western cultures, his “humanitarian” open-borders policies that he tried to foist on the nations of the West, his attack on capital punishment which is a linchpin of civilization, and his emphasis on the “rights of the human person” that added up to a kind of global socialism, all made him a vehicle and spokesman of leftism, even though the whole world thinks of him as a staunch and rigid “conservative.” Other than his great role in helping bring down Communism, and, of course, his holding the line against such absurdities as women’s ordination, I can’t think of anything positive, let alone conservative, connected with his papacy.

Please, let this Pope’s successor not be John Paul III. Let his successor be Pius XIII.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 02, 2005 04:34 PM | Send