having condemned
He also condemned condoms and other forms of contraception, doing nothing to help the fight against AIDS.
There's a lot of blood on his hands, & not only from the AIDS crisis:
Also:
In response to wholesale murders of innocents, grinding poverty and oppression by a handful of oligarchs, many in the Church in South and Central America embraced Christ's often stated values about caring for the poor and oppressed. (A message central to Christ's actual teachings, as opposed to any word about birth control, homosexuality or the supremacy of men over women).
This new Catholic teaching embraced things like land reform, still today a central issue of basic justice in countries where 99% of the land and wealth both are controlled by far less than 1% of the people. John Paul seemed completely unable to grasp the difference between the peasant's struggle for basic human dignity and the Soviet State, even when his own Archbishops, like Oscar Romero, traveled to Rome to talk about it.
Instead, Pope John Paul II told Romero (who was later assassinated by the very people John Paul urged him to cooperate with) to shut up and stop stirring up the people. When he travelled to Nicaragua in 1986, he told the crowd again to shut up and give up "unacceptable ideological commitments."
kuro5hin.org/story/2005/4/3/231846/1970
And let's not forget that his holiness did nothing while child sex abuse was rife in his organisation...well, actually he did something, he gave the green light to bishops to move abusive priests around to different parishes.
If they want to make him a saint after the above, yea, go for it, but they won't be winning over anybody who knows the truth of Karol's conservative Roman reign.
One of the most basic principals of humanity is protecting our children. One of the main precepts of Judaism and Islam is obeying the laws of the land in which they live. But Church officials don't believe this. In fact, they were accessories after the fact to unknown thousands of molestations, following Canon law, rather than the Civil law of the countries where this thing was rampant. That half a dozen bishops and archbishops and cardinals were not indicted as accessories to these crimes speaks to a flaw in democracy.
Pope John Paul II spoke incessantly about the evils of women being ordained, use of condoms and abortion. In fact, Canon law holds that getting an abortion is an issue of automatic excommunication. But priest child molesters were not defrocked, they were not turned in to civil authorities to answer for crimes, they were not excommunicated. In fact they were protected by the church and allowed to continue their reign of terror over Catholic children.
If I was Polish I certainly would not be proud of the Wadowice man and it's a shame here that people don't know the truth about his time as leader. Instead choosing to believe the propaganda they are feed by the church in Poland and the too-scared-to-mention-it media.
