R.I.P. John Paul II

Much has changed in the 26 years since Karol Wojtyla's papal election. Food, literacy, wealth, charity, medical care, environmental stewardship, and essential freedoms are more widespread now than at any moment in Earth's past. Countries are now debating same-sex marriages, when just a short time ago they were imprisoning homosexuals, condemning interracial marriages and enforcing segregation. Western wars are looking less like wars and more like police actions, while the most heinous crimes result from indifference or unseriousness such as we see happening with Sudan. An unregulated Internet enables the rapid distribution of ideas, as well as rapid responses to ideas. We remain every bit as a fallen as our ancestors (albeit in different ways), and human progress is always of the one-step-back-for-every-two-steps-forward variety, but at the same time we are struggling to rise with greater nobility than before. There were leaps and bounds in a matter of a few decades, and I have every reason to look to more leaps and bounds. My motto: Prepare for the worst, but hope for and work toward the best.

With the [beautiful, if repetitious] funeral of Pope John Paul II now at an end, I recall the Holy Father's ministry with both sadness and satisfaction. In attempting to mold entire societies to Church dogma (see today's quote) he held ill-considered views on homosexuality and the like, while on a related theme his blanket opposition to matters like therapeutic cloning and stem cell research revealed frightening scientific blind spots. He was also the pope who wholeheartedly embraced the Church's oft-neglected view that "The Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go," brought the papacy into the 20th Century with outreach well beyond traditional Catholicism, was as much a force in working toward the collapse of the Soviet Union as Ronald Reagan (who was socially liberal compared to the pope, come to think of it), and brought powerful diplomatic force to bear on behalf of countless lives in need. He fought intelligently, ethically and devoutly for some of the progress we take for granted. I respect him for that.