Please don't fail to read the 3rd essay, offering a deep, unique analysis. -Ed
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/04/1336240 AMY GOODMAN: And capitalism? Blase Bonpane: And on capitalism, extremely interesting. We saw he had a horror of Soviet communism, but when it came time for the first conference that he attended in Puebla in Mexico - I was there, as was Archbishop Romero -- this was 1979. The condemnation at Puebla was of unrestrained capital. He was very much against the deregulation. He was very much against what is called neoliberalismo today, the 19th century laissez-faire capitalism that showed only regard for profit and no regard for the common good. So to the surprise of everyone at that conference, the only thing condemned in the conference was unrestrained capital - Marxist analysis was kept as a methodology that was fully acceptable. He was not talking about people becoming Marxist, as such, but the use of Marxist analysis, that is, to recognize class warfare, to recognize the lack of distributive justice in society, was completely acceptable. So these things were on the positive side. And it was curious that prior to the conference in Puebla, the newspapers were coming out saying Pope John Paul II condemns liberation theology. It just didn't happen. The capitalist world was so afraid of what liberation theology implied that they wanted to condemn it in the press before the Pope even made a statement on it. So that part was of great interest to all of us, and liberation theology is simply a response to imperial theology, which has been with us since 312 A.D., since the time of Constantine, the emperor becoming a Christian. He brought the sword into Christianity and conversion by way of the sword, and that was ultimately seen in the Crusades, in the Inquisition, in the conquistadores. And these are all things for which Pope John Paul II apologized. He was horrified by Church history, and that included the Holocaust. I don't know of any pope that had apologized for the history of the Church prior to him. He was an extremely complex man. And there are many, many facets to this person, some that we're sorry about and many that we find quite unusual. *** http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5162343-103677,00.html 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 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 *** The Pope, the War, Modernity, & Sex: Should the Church After John Paul II Seek Restoration or Renewal? Submitted to Portside By Rabbi Arthur Waskow * What did John Paul II intend, and what did he accomplish, in his long reign? First, a personal vignette of my own. During the pre- war crisis of early 2002, some American activists who opposed the war knew that the Pope was condemning the plans to attack Iraq. But we felt there needed to be a dramatic act or focus -- something much stronger than the Vatican or the American bishops had yet ventured -- to give weight and bite to that condemnation. So in January and February 2002, I was among a network of religious folk who tried to persuade the Vatican to send the Pope to address the United Nations and then to meet with American religious leaders. In this way he could express far more publicly, dramatically, and in the United States itself his strong condemnation of the onrushing war. He could play in America the kind of role that he had played in Poland. Indeed, when I was invited to speak on February 14, 2002 -- the famous weekend of world-wide opposition to the war -- at a huge antiwar gathering of Italian Catholic social workers and activists in Rome, I made this plea both in public and in private. No act by anyone would have better galvanized the effort by Americans of every religious and ethical tradition to prevent the war. But he, and the Vatican, did not take that step When he faced the Soviet Union, John Paul II proved the stupidity of Stalin's old challenge, "How many divisions does the Pope control?" But not when he faced the United States. Why? To answer that question, I think we need to look more deeply at the question he himself posed as the overriding issue of the century: How should the Catholic Church deal with Modernity, in both its capitalist and communist variants? All the religious traditions on our planet have been upended by Modernity. The Modern project has brought into human hands enormous power over the earth and the human future that once were beyond us, in the hands of a King/ Lord. (For example: the power to wipe out life on earth, to create new species, to overthrow tyrants, to have sex without children, to have children without sex.) There have been three major responses of the religious communities to this wave of expanded Control: Surrender: Modernity brings more human weal than the old traditions; so we keep only shreds of the old patterns. Maybe one or two festivals a year, maybe marriage, probably death rituals. Little else. The domain of religion dramatically shrinks. Restoration: The whole Modern project is disgusting and destructive, from the H-bomb to the shattering of families and neighborhoods. Go back to the 17th century, or as close as possible. Put women, the earth, and other traditions back in their place: subordinate. Renewal: Some important aspects of Modernity are destructive; some are new forms of holiness. Instead of being swallowed up by Modernity or vomiting it out, taste it with care, digest what is sacred, eliminate what is disastrous. Among the new forms of sacred practice; the equality of women, and recognition of profound holy wisdom in traditions other than one's own. John Paul II pursued the Renewal path in regard to other communities than Roman Catholicism. - That is why many Jews have been grateful to him, and why Arab television carried the news of his death with such respect. But when it came to the role of women, not only in his Church but beyond it, and when it came to issues involving sexuality, he made every effort to Restore the past. His opposition to women or married men as priests and his failure to move swiftly and vigorously to squelch those powerful prelates who had tolerated the sexual abuse of children by priests have debilitated his church. His opposition not only to abortion but to most forms of contraception, not only for his own church but for all peoples, overrode his respect for other life- paths. - And his actions in these regards have been affronts both to the moral dignity of women and to the world's efforts to meet the dangers of the overproduction of human beings and the shattering thereby of ecological balance. Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, though John Paul's writings sketched opposition to the run- amok capitalism of the triumphant West, he did little to mobilize the Catholic Church against the evils he decried: consumerism, oppression of workers, and poisoning of the earth. He and the Vatican did far more to mobilize the Church against abortion, contraception, the full equality of women, and public respect for gay and lesbian relationships. For the Pope to have taken his opposition to the Iraq war into the teeth of the Bush Administration itself in 2002, and to have turned his theoretical opposition to runaway corporate capitalism into a real campaign against it, would have meant weakening the same forces in American society that agreed with the Pope about issues of sexuality and gender. To have mobilized such efforts might also have required unleashing a grass-roots movement of Catholics that would have vastly weakened the top-down power structure of the Church itself. Pope John XXIII began to take that risk. Paul VI was moving more slowly in the same direction. John Paul I in his three-month Papacy showed signs of a similar willingness. Not so John Paul II. Now the Church must choose: Restoration, or Renewal? Given the overwhelming domination of the College of Cardinals by men (!) named by this Pope, it would take something of a miracle to renew the Church on issues involving sexuality and women. Perhaps there is more hope when it comes to issues of globalized corporate capitalism, oiloholic addiction and its threat to scorch the planet, and the tendency of the present US government and of some elements of the Muslim world to ignite a shattering war between the US and all Islam. More hope that the Cardinals will see these questions as both more urgent and more consequential than their desire to put women and sex back in their subordinate places. As the Cardinals meet, sealed off for the moment from our planetary earthquakes, let us pray. Shalom, Arthur *Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center www.shalomctr.org [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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