Thank You, #42, we enjoy 'having' you.
'In life as in death, Jean Paul II was not a reformist. He was content to reveal, to a dumbfounded, global world,the genius of Catholicism, This is extraordinary in these times of nihilistic distress and its maniacal underside, fundamentalism.
Paradoxically, this man of faith was not universally heeded when he proclaimed his faith in the "rights of man". Pronounced in French, with his Polish accent and a detectable dash of slyness, the expression today makes extraordinary sense, initiating the everlasting exit of religion cheek by jowl with the ongoing emergence of humanism.
Since God is unconscious, and the clash of civilizations reveals the truth of metaphysics, today unleashed and unbridled, in the global rise of technology and the stock market bubble, we in the West wondered what a pope could do. Jean Paul II had the genius to turn the most generous elements of Catholicism against the drifting off course of this very metaphysics, to which his faith belonged, so as to embody an unprecedented, spectacular, and peace-bringing resistance.
When he said, to the anguish of the peoples crushed by Stalinian totalitarianism, "Don't be afraid!" this is the voice of a two-thousand-year-old theology, careful to recognize each conscience, suddenly transformed into a political act. It opened a breach in the Berlin Wall before the economy finished the job.'
(Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe)