CE9

[RocDoc]

Who the hell has spoonfed reincarnation to the very judgemental Mr Thorn?

[Thorngrub]

I spat it back up all over me bib. ;D

[Thorngrub]

oh, and that's just "mental", thank ya kindly

[RocDoc]

I woulda thought 'Mr.Mental' at least....

~

The Power of Faith

By Charles Krauthammer
Monday, April 4, 2005; Page A21

It was Stalin who gave us the most famous formulation of that cynical (and today quite fashionable) philosophy known as "realism" -- the idea that all that ultimately matters in the relations among nations is power: "The pope? How many divisions does he have?"

Stalin could have said that only because he never met John Paul II. We have just lost the man whose life was the ultimate refutation of "realism." Within 10 years of his elevation to the papacy, John Paul II had given his answer to Stalin and to the ages: More than you have. More than you can imagine.


History will remember many of the achievements of John Paul II, particularly his zealous guarding of the church's traditional belief in the sanctity of life, not permitting it to be unmoored by the fashionable currents of thought about abortion, euthanasia and "quality of life." But above all, he will be remembered for having sparked, tended and fanned the flames of freedom in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, leading ultimately and astonishingly to the total collapse of the Soviet empire.

I am not much of a believer, but I find it hard not to suspect some providential hand at play when the white smoke went up at the Vatican 27 years ago and the Polish cardinal was chosen to lead the Catholic Church. Precisely at the moment that the West most desperately needed it, we were sent a champion. It is hard to remember now how dark those days were. The 15 months following the pope's elevation marked the high tide of Soviet communism and the nadir of the free world's post-Vietnam collapse.

It was a time of one defeat after another. Vietnam invaded Cambodia, consolidating Soviet hegemony over all of Indochina. The Khomeini revolution swept away America's strategic anchor in the Middle East. Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas, the first Soviet-allied regime on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere. (As an unnoticed but ironic coda, Marxists came to power in Grenada too.) Then, finally, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

And yet precisely at the time of this free-world retreat and disarray, a miracle happens. The Catholic Church, breaking nearly 500 years of tradition, puts itself in the hands of an obscure non-Italian -- a Pole who, deeply understanding the East European predicament, rose to become, along with Roosevelt, Churchill and Reagan, one of the great liberators of the 20th century.

John Paul II's first great mission was to reclaim his native Eastern Europe for civilization. It began with his visit to Poland in 1979, symbolizing and embodying a spiritual humanism that was the antithesis of the soulless materialism and decay of late Marxist-Leninism. As millions gathered to hear him and worship with him, they began to feel their own power and to find the institutional structure -- the vibrant Polish church -- around which to mobilize.

And mobilize they did. It is no accident that Solidarity, the leading edge of the East European revolution, was born just a year after the pope's first visit. Deploying a brilliantly subtle diplomacy that never openly challenged the Soviet system but nurtured and justified every oppositional trend, often within the bosom of the local church, John Paul II became the pivotal figure of the people power revolutions of Eastern Europe.

While the success of these popular movements demonstrated the power of ideas and proved realism wrong, let us have no idealist illusions either: People power can succeed only against oppression that has lost confidence in itself. When Soviet communism still had enough sense of its own historical inevitability to send tanks against people in the street -- Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 -- people power was useless.

By the 1980s, however, the Soviet sphere was both large and decadent. And a new pope brought not only hope but political cunning to the captive nations yearning to be free. He demonstrated what Europe had forgotten and Stalin never knew: the power of faith as an instrument of political mobilization.

Under the benign and deeply humane vision of this pope, the power of faith led to the liberation of half a continent. Under the barbaric and nihilistic vision of Islam's jihadists, the power of faith has produced terror and chaos. That contrast alone, which has dawned upon us unmistakably ever since Sept. 11, should be reason enough to be grateful for John Paul II. But we mourn him for more than that. We mourn him for restoring strength to the Western idea of the free human spirit at a moment of deepest doubt and despair. And for seeing us through to today's great moment of possibility for both faith and freedom.

[e-mail]

[Rit]

k, well, i like Pissin's attitude to life about a hundred times more than i like Stratman19's..... and hence would gladly take the side of Pissin (and by extension Shin, kMc, Someone, Thornigan, DED, et. al)

BUT!!!

i won't budge an inch on this pope issue. The man was a symbol for a group of people, and he represented the best in them... most popes have been more flawed than usually can be found in men and women who this kind of highly warped attention placed on them, but John Paul II was able nonetheless be a man of principle.

for the punters that take exception to his edicts on birth control and abortion and shite, well, what the hell. you pansies. you weak. he's merely symptomatic of that ever present segment of society that will ALWAYS support that perspective on life (a flaw, yes, i know, but such are people, and such are what passes for opinions since time immemorial - the irony is that they think they're the ones with "ethics")

anyhoo. back to the point. You pansies. To write-off the virtues of a good man because of his allegiance to his belief system (which, technicalities aside, amount to not very much indeed.... i mean, he's no goddammed Protestant or Anglican after all. Them bitches are in it for the THEOLOGY -> there be your real enemy, brothers and sisters... the pope is a Catholic - only one of the most casual and worldly religious factions ever put on this earth, and therefore, THEREFORE!, as humane as any other salt of the earth.... don't believe me?! have you ever met and spoken to an ordinary run-of-the-mill Catholic, of which the statisticians claim every 1 in 6th human being is? shame on you, then. you're missing out. Attitudes on sex for example can range from a sacrament-by-virtue-of-restraint to an all out raunch bang-heads-on-the-bedpost, with a 'Hail Mary' the next morning. Catholics live life with zest. How so? coz they don't do Theology like the lesser relijins. They do life, and god happens to be a convenient token that they hang round their necks. Not only does this seem like a sensible and vibrant livelihood to me, it seems to operate with the most equilibrium in our complex world.)

sure, i'm catholic by birth, but i'm not at all religious, so i claim amnesty that way.

and Pissin rules. Stop picking on him.
Spirituality rules too. Just don't go 'round mistaking Theology for lifestyles of the unhindered and humane.

[chrisfan]

Reading that Krauthammer piece, I can't help but wonder -- the pope, as Krauthammer wrote, came into power at a time that the atheistic world of communism was posing a threat to the Catholic faith. He unquestionably in my mind, played a large role in rolling it back. Now, the Catholic faith faces the spread of radical Islam. Divine intervention? I have to say, I think that the observers who are focusing on the relationship between Islam and Catholicism as the driving choice for the cardinals in choosing the next pope are MUCH more on to something than those who are focused on the "need" for the church to turn away from the bible, and to the editorial page of the NY Times for guidance in the future direction of the church.

[maarts]

Under the benign and deeply humane vision of this pope, the power of faith led to the liberation of half a continent. Under the barbaric and nihilistic vision of Islam's jihadists, the power of faith has produced terror and chaos.

That's a fairly narrow vision in my view. Not all Catholics have been as prudent in liberation of half a continent to the same content as Islamists have been guilty of terror and chaos. As if Catholicism is implicitly good and Islam is implicitly bad. I don't believe that the Jihadists are in a majority within the Islam community, therefore to use this comparison to oppose the 'benign' Catholics is wrong.

[Dr. Drum]

I’d agree, maarts, one of the oversimplifications of that piece. But I think he undoes his main point anyway when he says, "...let us have no idealist illusions either: People power can succeed only against oppression that has lost confidence in itself. When Soviet communism still had enough sense of its own historical inevitability to send tanks against people in the street -- Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 -- people power was useless."

Contrast Krauthammer with this account...

We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse

It was Gorbachev, not the Pope, who brought the system down

Jonathan Steele
Friday April 8, 2005

The deaths of the powerful elicit extravagant claims, and many of the tributes to the man being buried in Rome today have been little short of grotesque. Dumbing-down comes over obituary writers, and in their eagerness to define a clear legacy they often produce simplifications that take no account of how the world and people change.

The way Poles saw communism in the 1970s is not the way they see it now. The Polish Catholic church was in regular dialogue with the communist authorities, and both worked subtly together at times to resist Soviet influence. John Paul altered his own views as he travelled.

So the notion that anti-communism was always a consistent part of his motivation is off the mark. It was prominent in his early trips to Poland but less important in his dealings with Latin America. Pacifism was also a key principle for John Paul, and when it came to preserving power in his own domain, authoritarianism was his watchword rather than the protection of freedom.

The retrospectives that draw a line between his first visit home as Pope in 1979, the rise of Solidarity a year later and the collapse of the one-party system in 1989 are especially open to question.

They ignore martial law, which stopped Solidarity in its tracks and emasculated it for most of the 1980s. It was a defeat of enormous proportions that John Paul could not reverse until the real power-holders in eastern Europe, the men who ran the Kremlin, changed their line.

The Pope's 1979 tour, with vast crowds at his open-air masses, undoubtedly gave Poles a tremendous sense of national revival. It added an unpredictable factor after decades of periodic crises between discontented workers, communist leaders who wanted to show their national credentials by finding a "Polish road to socialism" and narrow-minded rulers in Moscow.

The Pope's support when workers struck in Gdansk and founded the Solidarity union as Poland's first independent national organisation helped it to grow with amazing speed.

But things had changed a year later. Solidarity was split over tactics and goals. At its 1981 autumn congress, where western reporters were given full access, delegates fiercely debated priorities: was the key issue to be workers' demands for better wages and self-management in their factories or the call for political freedoms that the intellectuals on the Solidarity bandwagon saw as paramount? Should the union accept or reject the Communist party's leading role in government?

All sides agonised over whether and how Moscow would intervene. There were already strong hints that the Polish army would be used rather than Soviet tanks. None of us thought a clamp-down could be avoided. Within weeks we were proved right. The Kremlin got its way with relative ease. Poland's own communist authorities arrested thousands of Solidarity's leaders and drove the rest underground.

John Paul's reaction was soft. Armed resistance was not a serious option, but there were Poles who favoured mass protests, factory occupations and a campaign of civil disobedience. The Pope disappointed them. He criticised martial law but warned of bloodshed and civil war, counselling patience rather than defiance.

After prolonged negotiations with the regime, he made a second visit to Poland in 1983. Although martial law was lifted a month later, many Solidarity activists remained in jail for years. The government sat down to negotiate with Solidarity again only in August 1988, by which time Mikhail Gorbachev had already launched the drive towards pluralistic politics in the USSR itself and publicly promised no more Soviet military interventions in eastern Europe.

The impetus for Gorbachev's reforms was not external pressure from the west, dissent in eastern Europe or the Pope's calls to respect human rights, but economic stagnation in the Soviet Union and internal discontent within the Soviet elite.

The Pope's cautious reaction to martial law was prompted by his firm belief in non-violence. If it tempered his anti-communism, so did the high value he put on national pride.

His line on communist Cuba differed sharply from his line on Poland. He realised that Castro's resistance to US pressures reflected the feelings of most Cubans. He saw that nationalism and communist rule went hand in hand in Cuba in a way that they did not in Poland, where the party was ultimately subordinate to Moscow. In Havana the Pope mentioned freedom of conscience as a basic right, but his visit strengthened Castro. His critique of capitalism and global inequality echoed Castro's and he denounced the US embargo on Cuba.

Nor was John Paul's attack on liberation theology in the 1980s motivated primarily by the fact that the so-called "option for the poor" was infused with Marxism. The Pope was worried by other features too. He felt it was being used to justify violence and leading Catholic parish priests to support armed struggle by peasants against repressive landowners and feudal dictatorships.

In Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas toppled the US-backed Somoza regime by force, three priests became ministers. In El Salvador priests were often reporters' best conduits to guerrilla commanders, taking us into remote villages to meet them. In the Philippines some priests carried guns themselves. "The situation required more than a human rights group. I went underground and joined the defence forces," Father Eddy Balicao, who used to serve in Manila Cathedral, told me in the mountains of Luzon.

John Paul also opposed liberation theology because he saw priests defy their bishops and challenge the church's hierarchical structure. Even while communism still held power in Europe, he had more in common with it than many of his supporters admit. He recentralised power in the Vatican and reversed the perestroika of his predecessor-but-two John XXIII, who had given more say to local dioceses.

With the fall of "international communism", the Vatican was left as the only authoritarian ideology with global reach. There was no let-up in the Pope's pressures against dissent, the worst example being his excommunication of Sri Lanka's Father Tissa Balasuriya in 1997, an impish figure who questioned the cult of Mary as a docile, submissive icon and argued that, as a minority religion in Asia, Catholicism had to be less arrogant towards other faiths.

The Pope could not accept that challenge to the Vatican's absolutism. So it is fitting that he will be buried in the crypt from which John XXIII was removed, symbolically marking the primacy of Wojtyla's conservative era over the liberal hopes of an earlier generation.

Jonathan Steele reported from Poland, the Soviet Union and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

[chrisfan]

maarts said:

That's a fairly narrow vision in my view. Not all Catholics have been as prudent in liberation of half a continent to the same content as Islamists have been guilty of terror and chaos. As if Catholicism is implicitly good and Islam is implicitly bad. I don't believe that the Jihadists are in a majority within the Islam community, therefore to use this comparison to oppose the 'benign' Catholics is wrong.

But is that really what Krauthammer is saying? Is he really lumping ALL Catholics into the actions of the Catholic chruch, and ALL Islamists into acts of Islamic terrorism? I think without question the answer to that is no. I think he's speaking much more to the LEADERSHIP of the two groups. And please note that Krauthammer DID use the restraint to separate jihadists from the entire Islamic faith. I'd compare what Krauthammer is saying to a person stating that the allies liberated France from Germany's occupation during WW2. No one really mistakes that to mean that every single American or Brit is responsible for liberating France, simply because their countries were involved. Rather, the leadership of the allied nations, and the military action they took, led to the liberation. Further, to make the statement does not go on to say "The allied nations are free of any wrongdoing ever in history ... after all, they fought back Germany. If Krauthammer, or any other opinion writer, were required to get into the intricacies of all the good AND bad in any given piece they write, we would not be able to pick up newspapers.

[JACkory]

Rit said:

Catholics live life with zest. How so? coz they don't do Theology like the lesser relijins. They do life, and god happens to be a convenient token that they hang round their necks. Not only does this seem like a sensible and vibrant livelihood to me, it seems to operate with the most equilibrium in our complex world.)

sure, i'm catholic by birth, but i'm not at all religious, so i claim amnesty that way.

That sounds like a "sensible and vibrant livelihood"? It smacks of idolatry to me.
What's your problem with theology, anyway, Rit? I can't help it if I believe in a God who desires to be much more than just a "token to hang 'round my neck". One of the chief teachings of Solomon in the book of Proverbs is to obtain wisdom, and he tells us that knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Would you have me believe that all this wisdom and knowledge is going to come from experience, without the light of Scripture to place it in perspective? And what is theology but the detailed study of God and God's nature as revealed by Scripture and interpreted by believers over the course of history?
I have great respect for Catholics and the institution of the Catholic Church, but in respect to the levels of devotion practiced by the laity, I don't think there's all that much difference between Catholics and Protestants. There are plenty of Protestants who think it's a-okay to party it up on Saturday then drag-ass into church the next morning to pray for forgiveness (the equivalent of the "Hail Mary"s you mentioned).
The point I'd like to make is that theology is just as important to devout Catholics as it is to devout Protestants. It's important to anyone who desires to go deeper into the knowledge of the holy. But let us not make the mistake of assuming that a grasp of theology is essential to salvation any more than being born into a religion allows one to claim any sort of "amnesty" as an excuse to not believe.

Rit, I've always enjoyed the conversations we've had, regardless of whether or not we agreed on any particular subject. Indeed, I like your attitude.
Attitude, however, does not pull the same weight with me as your last post would indicate that it does with you. And therefore, attitude notwithstanding, I humbly disagree with a few of the things you posted about in that last one (especially the bits that seem to place Protestantism on a lower level of relevance than Catholicism).
I also disagree with your assessment that Pissin rules.

[shin]

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a fairly accomplished jurist, but he might want to get himself a good lawyer—and perhaps a few more bodyguards.

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny” decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy’s opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles “is a good ground of impeachment.” To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith,” Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the “good behavior” requirement for office and that “Congress ought to talk about impeachment.”

Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy “should be the poster boy for impeachment” for citing international norms in his opinions. “If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well.”

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38308-2005Apr8.html

When are these people going to be put in jail on terrorism charges? When? When?

[chrisfan]

shin said:

When are these people going to be put in jail on terrorism charges? When? When?

The day after Michael Moore is.

[melon1]

Touche', CF.

[melon1]

I must admit that although I believe there are many sincere devoted Catholics I believe a whole lot of the Catholic church is merely traditions of men. There are many parts of their theology that are nowhere to be found in scripture: the deification of Mary and the Apostles(including praying to them), confessing your sins to a priest, asking your priest permission to visit another church. I've seen all of this and it bothers me quite a bit. I've often attempted to have spiritual talks with many people who responded by simply saying,"I'm Catholic." As though that was the end all be all of our conversation. So I continue, "Well what has the Lord been telling you as of late?" "I went to mass." And wha usually follows is basically a great big, "Leave me alone." I remember visiting Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, a revival so big that people were crossing oceans to get there. I sat next to a couple from England. The evangelist said he met some people who claimed to be saved but when he brought up what God was doing in his life they didn't respond and were rather uncomfortable. He responded,"Don't you want to talk about God?.........Don't wanna talk about GOD? I question your salvation." Now I'm certainly not saying that all Catholics are unspiritual and shallow but their denomination is used more than any other I've come by as a scapegoat. Please someone tell me they identify with what I'm saying here.

[shin]

Michael Moore's been calling for the deaths of judges? Riiiiiight.