Posted 3:34 PM by Gene

I learned it wasn't my hard drive, but there's a device conflict someplace, meaning my computer won't work in anything but Safe Mode, which means I'm going to have to get a new one anyway -- I rather expected that -- but despite Safe Mode and possible nasty creepy crawlies and no one paying attention to me anyhow I had to post something now -- on a dank and gloomy day in more ways than one -- and if this isn't too good at least I can blame 640 x 480 resolution.



We now see one of the most forward-looking acts in history was the appointment of a certain Polish cardinal to Pope. The choice of John Paul II boldly stated that the head of the Catholic Church was not a figurehead; he spoke for humankind. In short order this Pope displayed his courage and strength by taking on Poland's dictators, the shove that began the toppling of the long row of empty decrepit dominoes that was Communism in Europe. But in his long and fruitful pontificate we expected courage and strength from this man, as he relentlessly challenged the forces of nihilism and decadence -- and when this Pope spoke for the sanctity of human life, and for the primacy of marriage, and against the Frankensteining of mankind, one knew the force of his message by the long and loud boos they occasioned, boos drowned out by the cheering crowds of the numberless numbers in his many travels. Who was he but the Polish Solzhenitsyn of the cloth, boldly chastising man for his blithe acceptance of evil? But the message was never too caustic because he expressed it with love. To his everlasting credit he made sure the word of God wouldn't be cooped up in a museum in a state within Rome. One may argue all his travels were a weakness; the more he traveled, the less the Pope --or rather, the office of the Pope -- had the aura, the mystery we expect from a mighty holy leader -- and there's no denying too that in his last years his papacy, weighted down with his own increasing frailty, suffered from a kind of incoherence, and at times completely devoid of nuance, as he blasted homosexuality while his Church remained deaf to the growing sex-abuse disaster in America, and through his inability to see that war, for all its evil, is sometimes a necessary one. We will forget the failings soon enough. This Pope was the living embodiment of the Declaration of Independence -- he endorsed life, he strove for liberty, and he never faltered in his epochal conviction that the real pursuit of happiness can only come through Jesus.

Terri Schiavo, the Pope -- God is delivering us a message, but we are too stupid or full of ourselves to comprehend it.

His successor will have a huge hat to fill. If he is half as energetic as the man whom the world now mourns, he will be a successful Pope indeed.