UNITED STATES
Truthout
Saturday, 03 May 2014
By Michael Gallagher, The Contrary Perspective | Op-Ed
Maureen Dowd, in her recent New York Times column (“A Saint, He Ain’t”), was, unfortunately, one of the few commentators on John Paul II’s canonization bold enough to voice a dissent.
I, for one, wholly agree with her misgivings. My only problem is that she should have expressed a few more. As heinous, she rightly notes, as was John Paul’s failure to take action with regard to the clerical sexual abuse scandal and, though she fails to mention it, his wallowing in self-pity when it was no longer possible to ignore it (“That this should fall upon me in my old age!” would have been red meat to a Devil’s Advocate fresh out of Infernal Law School if John Paul hadn’t abolished the office)—there were other significant transgressions as well.
The most serious of these had to do with Latin America and nuclear weapons. North American pundits, including Ms. Dowd, have next to nothing to say about the former and nothing at all about the latter.
To put it simply, John Paul, in his eagerness to gain America’s material support in liberating his native land (Poland got its first fax machines thanks to his good friend Ronald Reagan), had no qualms about selling Latin America down the river. He condemned Liberation Theology, acclaimed at the Latin American bishops’ conference in Puebla, Mexico, as Marxist-inspired and charged God’s Rottweiler (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s not-so-affectionate nickname) to put its proponents in their place. This, ironically enough, while he himself was ignoring Ratzinger’s warnings about two of John Paul’s favorites, the pedophile monk Hans Hermann Groer, whom he made archbishop of Vienna, and the notorious “Fr. Maciel,” the founder of the Legion of Christ and wooer of rich Mexican widows, perhaps the most versatile sexual predator in the history of the Church, which is going some.
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