rightnow909
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- Oct 5, 2021
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This is what one bishop said about JP II (from the book The Horn of the Unicorn by David White)
Pope John Paul II …had a lifelong love of the theater. He had been an actor in his youth but not successful enough to make a career out of it. Now on the world stage he could receive what all actors… seek—public approval and applause. Pope John Paul II spent his pontificate front and center on the world stage and the applause was nearly universal. To stay in Rome and slowly clean away the mire besmirching the Church—he seemed to have little time and small interest. If a few traditional Catholics held their hands in their laps and refused to applaud or even occasionally unleashed a catcall, they were overwhelmed by the cheers and accolades of the world audience. The bishops were allowed a free rein [by this pope] as long as they provided a platform on which he could appear and win the praise of the locals. He had to be the focus of the adoring multitudes… the biggest face on the screen, the lead photo on the front page in the morning...
Comments:
So yeh... a lot of Catholics, self included always wondered about this.. JP II going all over the world, basically telling people (or at least implying?) that they are just fine in the religion they are in! No need to accept Christ even--much less His Church...
What? He couldn't have done that from the Vatican.. on paper? The environmentalists.. where were they when all this jet fuel was filling the atmosphere? But liberals liked JP II, it seems--because he was not Catholic, really.
You know... call it intuition or what have you but, even though I never knew much about JP II (still don't know as much as I'd like), and even though back then I wasn't living a perfectly Christian life, something about him always bugged me. Now I know why. Then there's this: I never knew the changes of Vatican II either until in the last few years I started reading up on this kind of thing and even then... the most important stuff I learned I have learned just in the last couple months... which is telling all by itself. The "church" seems to like to keep parishioners uninformed..
In any case, my intuition was just so right on vis a vis both JP II and the 2nd Vatican Council (which again, was not dogmatic so we can all summarily toss it into the ocean)
Pope John Paul II …had a lifelong love of the theater. He had been an actor in his youth but not successful enough to make a career out of it. Now on the world stage he could receive what all actors… seek—public approval and applause. Pope John Paul II spent his pontificate front and center on the world stage and the applause was nearly universal. To stay in Rome and slowly clean away the mire besmirching the Church—he seemed to have little time and small interest. If a few traditional Catholics held their hands in their laps and refused to applaud or even occasionally unleashed a catcall, they were overwhelmed by the cheers and accolades of the world audience. The bishops were allowed a free rein [by this pope] as long as they provided a platform on which he could appear and win the praise of the locals. He had to be the focus of the adoring multitudes… the biggest face on the screen, the lead photo on the front page in the morning...
Comments:
So yeh... a lot of Catholics, self included always wondered about this.. JP II going all over the world, basically telling people (or at least implying?) that they are just fine in the religion they are in! No need to accept Christ even--much less His Church...
What? He couldn't have done that from the Vatican.. on paper? The environmentalists.. where were they when all this jet fuel was filling the atmosphere? But liberals liked JP II, it seems--because he was not Catholic, really.
You know... call it intuition or what have you but, even though I never knew much about JP II (still don't know as much as I'd like), and even though back then I wasn't living a perfectly Christian life, something about him always bugged me. Now I know why. Then there's this: I never knew the changes of Vatican II either until in the last few years I started reading up on this kind of thing and even then... the most important stuff I learned I have learned just in the last couple months... which is telling all by itself. The "church" seems to like to keep parishioners uninformed..
In any case, my intuition was just so right on vis a vis both JP II and the 2nd Vatican Council (which again, was not dogmatic so we can all summarily toss it into the ocean)
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