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If a person is supremely holy, he or she must have been supremely holy before or after John Paul II.
The fact that there is such a marked difference in the rate of canonization has to be explained.
Either eminently holy people were not being acknowledged before and now, or John Paul II debased the
standards.
The Vatican is supposed to be an enduring embodiment of sublime mystical truth. It shouldn't be in
the business of pandering to public opinion. The fact is that under John Paul II, standards were
grotesquely lowered. Virtually anyone who went to mass every week throughout their life, collected
four tokens from the back of a Corn Flakes packet and put something in the collection box each week
could be made into a saint, as long as they came from a country John Paul II deemed strategically
important.
He politicised the papacy. As a Pole, resentful of Soviet domination, he was engaged in a crusade
against communism. He saw his saint-making campaign as part of an anti-communist initiative. It is
totally inappropriate to mix religion and politics in this way. The fact that John Paul II did so,
and the fact that he cheapened the canonisation process, makes it hard for objective observers to
take the catholic church seriously. |
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I know, it's like any old mug can call himself a Saint these days. |
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The catholic church has been demeaning itself since the beginning of the religion. It has killed and
destroyed more people, cultures, history, and young boys virginity than any other abomination ever
to exist on the earth. J.P 2 was one of the good things about the church. |
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Pope John Paul II realized more than most of his predecessors that one of the best ways to
strengthen the ties of the faithful to the Catholic Church was to honour national, Catholic role
models who were already revered by Catholics. The fact is that the Catholic Church is a
supra-national organization, in a world that is still very much defined by individual nations and
states. As such, the pope can best attract people to this multinational church by recognizing the
achievements of Catholics in individual countries. JP2 was a smart, shrewd communicator and he
realized that this was among the most important skills for any public figure to possess.
Many of the people who John Paul II canonized were already de facto regarded as saints by national
churches and believers who revered them greatly. The only major change that JP2 brought to the
process of deciding canonization was that he eliminated the role of the devil's advocate.
While it is true that JP2 canonized more people than over a dozen popes before him combined, we
should keep in mind that John Paul's reign was also the third longest in the history of the Roman
Catholic Church. |
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If he did make more saints than all the Popes before him then you're probably right... But... John
Paul was one of the few Popes I and much of the rest of the world actually liked. He was a man of
the common people. Frankly I'd trust him to tell me who a saint is more than the other Popes. |
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02 Jul 2008 20:23
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