UNITED STATES
National Catholic Register
by Joan Frawley Desmond Thursday, April 24, 2014
This week, as millions of Catholics travel to Rome for the canonization of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II, the New York Times’ columnist, Maureen Dowd, attacked the decision to proclaim the Church’s first Polish pope a saint.
John Paul was a charmer, and a great man in many ways. But given that he presided over the Catholic Church during nearly three decades of a gruesome pedophilia scandal and grotesque cover-up, he ain’t no saint.
It is not the first time Dowd has pounded away at the credibilty of the Catholic Church or of a pope, and it won’t be the last. But it is worth pausing to register her remarks because her anger is shared by many Catholics who believe John Paul tolerated or dismissed the cancer of clergy sexual abuse while he was pope, rather than removing negligent bishops and challenging a status quo that permitted huge financial settlements made by dioceses, during the 1980s and 1990s, without real institutional reform.
Yet, it cannot be denied that John Paul also inspired the struggle to liberate Eastern Europe form Soviet dominiation, and that his personal virtue and spiritual paternity drew many Catholics back to the Church, gave the disabled and the vulnerable a renewed respect for their own inviolable dignity, and encouraged thousands of young people to embrace a priestly or religious vocation. At the time of his funeral in 2005, many in St. Peter’s Square spontaneously called for his canonization.
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