Death+to+the+Pope,+The+Week

THE WEEK

 * ending 3 April 2005**

=DEATH TO THE POPE=

Karol Wojtyla, born near Cracow in 1920 became Pope in 1978 only the second non-Italian to hold the post. On 7 June 1982 Pope John Paul met Ronald Reagan in Westminster Abbey to coordinate a campaign to hasten the dissolution of Stalinism in the East. Reagan gave him the Medal of Honour. The Pope opposed the 'liberation theology' that was popular in Latin America for prioritising political change over faith.

At the end of the Millennium, the papal encyclical Reason and Faith embraced the post-modern denunciation of the rational project. Noting that postmodern ‘nihilism has been justified in a sense by the terrible experience of evil which has marked our age’, the Pope asserts that ‘such a dramatic experience has ensured the collapse of rationalist optimism, which viewed history as the triumphant progress of reason, the source of all happiness and freedom’. His Holiness warns against ‘a certain positivist cast of mind’ which ‘continues to nurture the illusion that, thanks to scientific and technical progress, man and woman may live as a demiurge, single-handedly and completely taking charge of their destiny’.

With the radical movement in abeyance, the Pope re-heated the liberation theology themes for a contemporary anti-capitalist audience. In 1999, in Mexico, the Pope decried surging 'neoliberalism,' a system 'based on a purely economic conception of man' that holds 'profit and law of the markets as its only parameters'. This leftward turn, though, was entirely in keeping with the trajectory of conservative, middle class thinking. Once the threat from the left had receded, it was safe to post-up some marginal complaints against the market system, which was most despised for threatening a resumption of class conflict. In all other respects, Pope John Paul II remained the provincial obscurantist, resentful at the advance of women, retailing tawdry sainthoods and rituals.