I can relate to the struggle Catholics of intellect, worldly experience, and sensitivity have about the Church and the Pope. Having escaped ordination, and several monkish orders myself I know the weight of the struggle aginst what we know to be true when it is not correspondant to what we experience as real. But, I know through practical hard won freedom “That there is less to being religious and being Catholic.” Law without justice is tyranny. So, sayest the Protestant reformation until its time of corruption under the hypnotic lure of power. Hello, evangelical absolutests. Also, says the advent of the Age of Enlightenment and the concept that no man, nation, or ideologue is infallible. All men are created equal in the eyes of their maker. The aching desire for the manifestion of the sublime rests not in a holy monster like John Paul II, but in acts of practical love, compassion, charity and healing. Peace and spiritual growth is not a submissive game it demands the stamina to stand against the likes of soon to be sainted totalitarian enties like the Pope even when a deluded world says we are wrong and even if it seems were are born into an alternative reality. If one wants a true saint in the Christain system look to Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount or exceptions to the Pancreator rule–Saint Francis. It is there we find Sarah’s circle not Jacobs ladder.

Hurray for Haloscan! Thanks for weighing in, John. As someone with very little knowledge of modern Catholicism, I appreciate you taking the time to explain the allure this pope had to people of faith.

Wow! It all posted! Now Haloscan becomes one less thing to despise.

Forgetting John Paul II’s historical and political context for a second, let me just spew about his religious context and how it affected me. So indulge my own massive ego for a moment.

As someone who still considers himself a Catholic, the one thing that I think most secular assessments of John Paul II miss was his understanding of the value of orthodoxy — even as Pope he believed that doctrine was something you accepted or rejected in the whole of its substance. It’s not important how you “feel” about some particular element of the catechism or whether or not it makes sense to you. But it’s important that your faith allow you to accept the discipline and rigor of a Church whose supremacy emanates from Christ and whose accumulated wisdom far transcends your own ability to comprehend the natural and supernatural.

For me, it’s that leap of faith that makes the Church both so appealing and appalling. I crave the transcendent while I’m really in love with the reason and ideas that bounce around in my own prideful head. It makes me both envy those for whom faith comes easily and also desperately want to dismiss them as morons.

John Paul II was completely unambivalent in his faith and by any standard intellectually briliant. For someone like me, that made him immensely attractive and impossible to dismiss. And I thank God (doubts notwithstanding) for putting a man so challenging on the throne of Peter during my lifetime.

Of course I’m despondent over the Church’s many scandals and I’d have no problem acceping the sacraments from women. But there’s more to being religious and being Catholic than that, and John Paul II was a living reminder of that.