Notes on a (Hopefully Final) Farewell

As you could only miss if you were in a persistent vegetative state being ministered to by the likes of a dark self-identified master like Father Pavone, Brother Mahoney, or Randall Terry, the Pope has been buried.

Let me revisit a few of my comments since a certain snarkiness seemed inevitable since we had his death non-stop after Schiavo non-stop. I'm chuck full of televised death watches, especially when it was just two celebrated cases that could be perverted for various uses.

I did not hate John Paul II. Historically, there have been much worse popes, at least if you believe printed histories. PR wise, JPII was pretty damned good for the Catholic Church. I appreciated his outspokenness about the Iraq War, for example. I appreciated some of his more eloquent moments against the American practice of relatively frequent use of the death penalty.

Instead, I was profoundly disappointed in him. JPI seemed to offer a lot of promise that the sudden death-and-the-arrival of JPII nipped in the bud. JP II - whether this was his own belief or not - chose to keep Catholics in the proverbial dark. Watching what AIDS was doing in Africa and parts of Asia and Eastern Europe, he wouldn't even allow condoms to be used.

JPII did nothing to advance either nearly 50% of the world's population (women) or nearly 10% of any given population (gay men and women). At a time of record problems with getting and keeping good priests, he chose to pretend that "public abstinence" would not exacerbate the problem of priests who cannot be abstinent.

And at this same time, we saw dramatic examples of how some priests abused their power and their parishioners. The Pope's response: Americans, stop embarrassing me; get this out of the headlines so we can pretend this is not an issue.

Throughout that period, the Pope was not only not infallible, he was profoundly wrong as a Christian, a leader, and a so-called great man.

Overall, considering the damage he allowed to continue, the fact that he and his great office never once reached out to the victims of the priest abuse scandal (understandable in a corporate leader but as God's rep on earth?), I cannot pretend he was a wonderful man and a proper leader of the Catholic Church. We can forgive him for being human, because that is what he really is - all happy horseshit aside, but a human who could take that position and not do the very best job possible is a little less forgivable.