I enjoyed reading George Weigel when he was stationed in Seattle and a member of the World Without War Council. I read First Things cover to cover back in the 1990s, and enjoyed articles by Michael Novak and Rev. Neuhaus. Exceptionally good writing and ideas every issue. I bought my mother a subscription.
Then comes Geo Bush, the Iraq war, and things things started going very badly editorially at First Things. It became pro-war, with Weigel leading the way with very twisted “just war” arguments. You can read his ouerve here and judge for yourself. Let me be fair: Weigel is a great writer and a wonderful intellect. His just war arguments are truly junk, and not representative of his skills. It is almost as if he was paid to put his name on trash, so do not judge his abilities by this thread.
From reading these writers, you would get the impression John Paul II was pro-USA and approved of the USA criminal acts in the middle east. Quite the contrary, from a Catholic news service we learn USA criminality, along with Sicilian mafia criminality, as the only times Pope John Paul II got truly angry.
To wit:
***
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the archbishop of Krakow, who was John Paul II's personal secretary for more than 40 years, spoke of the two loves of the Polish Pontiff: "God and mankind, and in particular the youth."
He also revealed the two occasions he saw John Paul II "really angry," but with "good reason."
"In Agrigento, [Sicily], he raised his voice against the mafia, and we were all a little scared," he said.
"And the other occasion was during the Angelus, before the Iraq War, when he said with force: no to war, war doesn't resolve anything. I have seen war. I know what war is."
"He sent a cardinal to Washington, [D.C], and another to Baghdad, to say: do not seek to resolve these problems with war. And he was right. The war is still ongoing and it hasn't resolved anything."
***
Weigel, Neuhaus and Novak personally met the Pope a few times, and parlayed that into the impression the Pope approved of their statements. The problem is, when all of this middle east stuff goes even worse than it is now, and future generations study who to condemn for this travesty, Weigel, Neuhaus and Novak will be cited to condemn this Pope for supporting the crimes in the middle east.
It took a one-two punch to keep the Vatican from getting its pro-peace message out. On the one hand, there were the wide-spread false charges of priestly pederasty, orchestrated charges that were handled poorly on advice of counsel by the Church worldwide. (I was there, I saw what happened, the media has it wrong, and people love a corrupt clergy story.) The other punch was to mischaracterize the Pope as pro-war by the theocons at First Things. Both punches continue to do much harm to this day.
I wonder how the right wing Christians who are delirious at the Pope making sainthood would react if they knew this pope was anti-war. Anti-their war.
0 comments:
Post a Comment