Having written lots of works does not make you respected at all, in fact, I could give you a list 5 times that long for Rush Limbough and Ann Coulter, would that make you take them at their word?
Originally posted by: aidanjm
Originally posted by: CycloWizard
I'm not sure why you think you can reasonably expect anyone to respect you when you refuse to respect even the defenseless dead. *shakes his head*Originally posted by: aidanjm
Excellent article by Christopher Hitchens:
Papal Power. What no one else will say about John Paul II
I need read only a few sentences before I realize how ignorant your source is. I guess when you're grasping at straws, you grab the manure it covers.
Christopher Hitchens is a respected journalist, his articles are published in a wide range of magazines and news papers (including both liberal and conservative publications), I don't see how he could reasonably be described as ignorant. Are you saying you identified factual errors in his article?
Christopher Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, Hitchens flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the "permanent government" of entrenched powers and interests.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
His books include Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (Cassell, 1976); Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989); Imperial Spoils: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles (Hill and Wang, 1989); Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990); and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995); as well as two collections including many Nation essays: Prepared for the Worst (Hill and Wang, 1989) and For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993). His most recent book is No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 2000).
Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper's and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.
Originally posted by: computerpro3
Originally posted by: aidanjm
Originally posted by: CycloWizard
I'm not sure why you think you can reasonably expect anyone to respect you when you refuse to respect even the defenseless dead. *shakes his head*Originally posted by: aidanjm
Excellent article by Christopher Hitchens:
Papal Power. What no one else will say about John Paul II
I need read only a few sentences before I realize how ignorant your source is. I guess when you're grasping at straws, you grab the manure it covers.
Christopher Hitchens is a respected journalist, his articles are published in a wide range of magazines and news papers (including both liberal and conservative publications), I don't see how he could reasonably be described as ignorant. Are you saying you identified factual errors in his article?
Christopher Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, Hitchens flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the "permanent government" of entrenched powers and interests.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
His books include Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (Cassell, 1976); Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989); Imperial Spoils: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles (Hill and Wang, 1989); Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990); and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995); as well as two collections including many Nation essays: Prepared for the Worst (Hill and Wang, 1989) and For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993). His most recent book is No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 2000).
Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper's and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.
Having written lots of works does not make you respected at all, in fact, I could give you a list 5 times that long for Rush Limbough and Ann Coulter, would that make you take them at their word?
Yes, more than I care to count. His entire 'article on the pope' is a bunch of conjecture, if you can even call it that, that he submits completely unsupported other than a single link to a book on Amazon for one of the least points he makes. Of course, you would realize that he doesn't know what he's talking about as soon as he calls a Catholic (Mother Theresa) a fundamentalist, since Catholics are definitely not fundamentalists. He either doesn't know the meaning of the word or he's completely ignorant - take your pick. His stated goal is the demonization of religion, so I'm not surprised you picked him as a source. Trolls would do nothing less, and you've certainly demonstrated yourself to be that.Originally posted by: aidanjm
Christopher Hitchens is a respected journalist, his articles are published in a wide range of magazines and news papers (including both liberal and conservative publications), I don't see how he could reasonably be described as ignorant. Are you saying you identified factual errors in his article?
Originally posted by: aidanjm
Originally posted by: computerpro3
Originally posted by: aidanjm
Originally posted by: CycloWizard
I'm not sure why you think you can reasonably expect anyone to respect you when you refuse to respect even the defenseless dead. *shakes his head*Originally posted by: aidanjm
Excellent article by Christopher Hitchens:
Papal Power. What no one else will say about John Paul II
I need read only a few sentences before I realize how ignorant your source is. I guess when you're grasping at straws, you grab the manure it covers.
Christopher Hitchens is a respected journalist, his articles are published in a wide range of magazines and news papers (including both liberal and conservative publications), I don't see how he could reasonably be described as ignorant. Are you saying you identified factual errors in his article?
Christopher Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, Hitchens flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the "permanent government" of entrenched powers and interests.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
His books include Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (Cassell, 1976); Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989); Imperial Spoils: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles (Hill and Wang, 1989); Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990); and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995); as well as two collections including many Nation essays: Prepared for the Worst (Hill and Wang, 1989) and For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993). His most recent book is No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 2000).
Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper's and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.
Having written lots of works does not make you respected at all, in fact, I could give you a list 5 times that long for Rush Limbough and Ann Coulter, would that make you take them at their word?
Feel free to point out any factural errors in the article that might lead you to label the author as "ignorant".
Originally posted by: Red Dawn
He lived a long productive life and was able to do and see things most of us wouldn't even dream about. No need to be sad, life goes on.
Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Ewwww, just read that the Pols want his heart shipped to them to be buried there.
Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Ewwww, just read that the Pols want his heart shipped to them to be buried there.
Originally posted by: loki8481
Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Ewwww, just read that the Pols want his heart shipped to them to be buried there.
that's freaky.
I thought his will specified where he wanted to be buried, though.
Originally posted by: Siwy
Originally posted by: loki8481
Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Ewwww, just read that the Pols want his heart shipped to them to be buried there.
that's freaky.
I thought his will specified where he wanted to be buried, though.
It?s a long time tradition for an important Pole buried outside of Poland to have his heart buried separately in his homeland where his heart had always been.
What would be really freaky is if they let pope?s would-be assassin to attend the funeral.
Never knew the guy.Originally posted by: cobalt
Whether you agree with his religious beliefs or not, he played a big part in the events of our generation.
The Catholic Church, so attractive during the time of Pope John, lost much of its respect and esteem -- especially because it was perceived, perhaps unfairly, to be hostile to both women and homosexuals.
To make matters worse, the sexual abuse crisis -- which the Vatican still would like to pretend is an American problem -- has spread throughout Europe and has traumatized the credibility of the church leadership. The pope's reaction to it seems to many to be less vigorous than would be appropriate. Sex was the touchstone of his restoration of order to the church, but not, it might have been fairly said, the sexual behavior of priests.
No one in his right mind would question the personal virtue, the good intentions, the sincerity of the late pontiff. Yet, clearly he failed to restore the discipline of the church's traditional sexual ethic. The lower clergy and the laity are even less likely today, despite all his efforts, to accept that discipline than when he came to office.
Shaking off the trappings of Empire - Fintan O'Toole
'The Papacy," wrote Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, "is nothing other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof." He thus summed up both the allure and the danger of the pomp that surrounds the death of Pope John Paul II.
The demise of a Pope and election of his successor creates excitement for many reasons, some of them nothing to do with religion. The Pope is many things, but one of them is the last emperor. The ghost of the Roman Empire still haunts the church's structures of authority, with the Pope as Caesar and the Conclave as the Senate. What we have witnessed in the last week and will see in the next fortnight is a reminder that the church is a fusion of two contradictory impulses: the visionary preaching of a Jewish holy man and the pragmatic power politics of the Roman Empire.
Jesus may have provided the soul of Christianity, but the Emperor Constantine, who began the process of making it the official imperial religion, provided its body. The great struggle ever since has been that between the Christian spirit and the imperial form. As the world's other empires have collapsed, the structures have stood out ever more clearly for what they are: the vestigial remnants, not of the crucified, but of the crucifiers. These remnants, like all ancient relics, are fascinating, and their current display will be enthralling to billions of people around the world. But it would be a grave mistake to confuse this magnetism with genuine spirituality. It may be a temporarily bewitching media attraction, but it is in fact a spectre that the church has to exorcise.
For all his talent, charisma and iconoclastic energy, John Paul was never the man for that job. His freshness, his directness and his capacity for making connections with people both in person and on the television screen certainly fitted him for the task. But his mentality did not. He may have dumped some of the outward monarchical baggage of the Papacy, but it was not accidental that one of his concluding acts was to canonise another last emperor, the final head of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Charles I. Born shortly after the great bonfire of European empires in the aftermath of the first World War, he retained an obvious nostalgia for that lost world.
He was, besides, proof of one of the great political paradoxes - that people are formed in large part by that which they oppose. The Irish nationalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were, above all, good Victorians. Bolshevism stole the clothes of Tsarism. Napoleon became just another French monarch. And John Paul absorbed much more from the Stalinism he opposed than he ever seemed to realise. He shared its distrust of liberal democracy, looking on the developed West as a weak and decadent culture. He was a fierce critic of consumer capitalism whose Bible, the Wall Street Journal, attacked his views on economics, not entirely inaccurately, as "warmed-over Marxism". And, above all, he despised and crushed internal dissent. Though the language he used was different, his alarm at deviationism and his insistence on adherence to the party line mirrored the Stalinist culture in which he operated for so long. His mixture of idealism and authoritarianism would have made him a brilliant boss of the Polish CP.
Such a mind was never going to come to terms with the imperial phantoms that haunt the legacy of Christ. Even while he was bringing the church so triumphantly into the age of global mass media, he operated as a benign, conscientious and dynamic emperor. He issued edicts and expected them to be obeyed without demur. He visited the far-flung corners of his empire, bucking up his troops but also stamping out incipient rebellions. He established good relations with the other religious empires.
He surrounded himself with a praetorian guard, chosen more for its loyalty and orthodoxy than visionary intelligence. And, like all emperors, he ultimately met crises with denial, refusing to see how rapidly the church's appalling behaviour over the sexual abuse of children was eroding its authority from within.
Yet the age of empires is past. John Paul himself was the catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet imperium, providing an ironic answer to Stalin's famous question about how many divisions the Pope could muster. The neo-imperial ambitions of the US are already doomed. There is no future in imperial dreaming.
The great resonance of John Paul's death beyond the Catholic world is precisely because it brings a historical era to a close.
He is the last global figure to be shaped by that awful time when much of Europe responded to the loss of familiar empires by attempting to construct new ones, viler and more savage.
Only if it understands and embraces that sense of an ending can the church emerge from John Paul's long papacy with renewed vigour.
The question now is whether the church can finally ditch Constantine and get back to Christ. Can it lay the ghost of the Roman imperium and become something other than a male gerontocracy?
Or will the next Pope continue to sit enthroned, with a beautiful crown and gorgeous robes, on the grave of a dead empire?
© The Irish Times
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
The 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
Originally posted by: Darkhawk28
Like the neocons don't bash the Pope. They bashed him left and right, constantly.
COLMES: And before you respond, let me just put up what the pope says: "No to war," says Pope John Paul II, during his annual address to scores of diplomatic emissaries to the Vatican... 'War is not always inevitable,' he said. 'It is always a defeat for humanity.'" Are these a bunch of wild-eyed liberal loonies?
HANNITY: Yes.
So what difference did the pontiff's trip make to Lebanon? Did we have a Poland moment, where his visit glavanised his fellow countrymen to throw off the shackes of communism?
We didn't have the drama of a Polish moment, but in my view the papal visit did make a difference to this country. I would assert he actually helped establish a new political climate that paved the way for the current political uprising. He came here and said openly that Lebanon and the Lebanese needed to embrace change.
Originally posted by: cquark
Like most prominent figures, John Paul II leaves us with a mixed legacy, neither completely good, nor completely bad.
While his efforts against Communism achieved a great deal of good, his work against the moderate reforms of Vatican II and his authoritarianism have harmed the church, especially in his attempt to sweep the sexual abuse scandal under the rug.
Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: Darkhawk28
Like the neocons don't bash the Pope. They bashed him left and right, constantly.
And exploited his death for their agenda.
And this:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/04/05.html#a2314COLMES: And before you respond, let me just put up what the pope says: "No to war," says Pope John Paul II, during his annual address to scores of diplomatic emissaries to the Vatican... 'War is not always inevitable,' he said. 'It is always a defeat for humanity.'" Are these a bunch of wild-eyed liberal loonies?
HANNITY: Yes.
Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Originally posted by: cquark
Like most prominent figures, John Paul II leaves us with a mixed legacy, neither completely good, nor completely bad.
While his efforts against Communism achieved a great deal of good, his work against the moderate reforms of Vatican II and his authoritarianism have harmed the church, especially in his attempt to sweep the sexual abuse scandal under the rug.
He is however in all likelyhood to be declared Saint Karol and deservedly so.
Originally posted by: loki8481
Originally posted by: dmcowen674
Originally posted by: cquark
Like most prominent figures, John Paul II leaves us with a mixed legacy, neither completely good, nor completely bad.
While his efforts against Communism achieved a great deal of good, his work against the moderate reforms of Vatican II and his authoritarianism have harmed the church, especially in his attempt to sweep the sexual abuse scandal under the rug.
He is however in all likelyhood to be declared Saint Karol and deservedly so.
sure, in a hundred years. for now, he'll probably get the title "the Great."
Originally posted by: CycloWizard
It's easy to mock what you don't understand, I guess. Nice selection of articles - I don't think I've ever seen one that called the pope 'neanderthal' before. :roll: