The Pope is Dead…

…Long live the Pope?

I do not feel any personal sadness whatsoever at the passing of this Pope. I’m afraid I never had much time for Karol Wojtyla. Yes, charisma he had in spades – his training as an actor clearly paid off. And he has had a major impact on reshaping the Catholic church. But alongside the scale in which is put such elements as his championship of the poor is the scale in which he refused to permit the use of condoms, thus ensuring the painful death of many thousands through AIDS.

As Terry Eagleton writes in the Guardian today: "The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his hands. He was one of the greatest disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin."

In his address of the 10th January to the Diplomatic Corps of the Vatican, Pope Paul II stated that “the family is also threatened by legislation which at times directly challenge its natural structure, which is and must necessarily be that of a union between a man and a woman founded on marriage. The family […] must never be undermined by laws based on a narrow and unnatural vision of man". Sometimes I wonder just who had the narrow vision around here…

And yes, I am base enough to feel personally offended by him characterising my marriage as part of the "Ideology of Evil" that is threatening society (in the pages of his last book Memory and Identity). Little old moi? Part of the ideology of evil? Threatening society?

He built an extraordinary power base in his years as Pope; gathering around him, and appointing, cardinals who shared the same world view. Cardinals such as Joseph Ratzinger. I don’t happen to believe in any gods, but God help the Catholic church, and by osmosis, the rest of us, if Ratzinger becomes the next Pope.