Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Tired of all the praise for John Paul II?
With the wall-to-wall encomia for John Paul II's good works, it's good that there are contrarians willing to sound different notes.
Christopher Hitchens points out that "[a] few years ago, it seemed quite probable that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston would have to face trial for his appalling collusion in the child-rape racket that his diocese had been running. The man had knowingly reassigned dangerous and sadistic criminals to positions where they would be able to exploit the defenseless. He had withheld evidence and made himself an accomplice, before and after the fact, in the one offense that people of all faiths and of none have most united in condemning." Now (the ironically named) Law has taken refuge from Massachusetts law in a sinecure in Vatican City, beyond the reach of extradition treaties. (Let us not also forget Hitchens' smack-down from a few years back of the beatification of Mother Teresa, whom he called "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.")
And Harold Meyerson laments that the Catholic Church has abandoned the "vibrant intellectualism of the Vatican II era" in favor of a doctrinaire orthodoxy on issues such as abortion and birth control. "Where once the Catholic Church had such engaged and vigorous leaders as Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, today it is suffused with John Paul's party-line hacks."
Christopher Hitchens points out that "[a] few years ago, it seemed quite probable that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston would have to face trial for his appalling collusion in the child-rape racket that his diocese had been running. The man had knowingly reassigned dangerous and sadistic criminals to positions where they would be able to exploit the defenseless. He had withheld evidence and made himself an accomplice, before and after the fact, in the one offense that people of all faiths and of none have most united in condemning." Now (the ironically named) Law has taken refuge from Massachusetts law in a sinecure in Vatican City, beyond the reach of extradition treaties. (Let us not also forget Hitchens' smack-down from a few years back of the beatification of Mother Teresa, whom he called "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.")
And Harold Meyerson laments that the Catholic Church has abandoned the "vibrant intellectualism of the Vatican II era" in favor of a doctrinaire orthodoxy on issues such as abortion and birth control. "Where once the Catholic Church had such engaged and vigorous leaders as Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, today it is suffused with John Paul's party-line hacks."
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