The Whore of Babylon is Innocent

Never mind idle speculation about who next gets the big hat in the Vatican, much more interesting is the name the new Pontiff picks. There hasn't been an Innocent Bishop of Rome since 1724, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. "POPE INNOCENT" would make a fine headline.

Except, of course, the last one wasn't. Popespotting Jamie at Blood and Treasure has a series of posts on the late John Paul II (here, here and here), whilst Terry Eagleton lets rip over here:

As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla hailed from what was probably the most reactionary national outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin Mary-worship, nationalist fervour and ferocious anti-communism. Years of dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Both institutions were closed, dogmatic, censorious and hierarchical, awash with myth and personality cults. It was just that, like many alter egos, they also happened to be deadly enemies, locked in lethal combat over the soul of the Polish people.

I've hinted at this elsewhere, but the haste with which a fascist sympathisers like Josemaria Escriva or a quisling like Alojzije Stepaniac are fast-tracked to their halos, whilst an actually halfway decent Catholic like Oscar Romero was sidelined said much for the ideological predilections of Pope John Paul II. His was a Papacy hell-bent on reversing, as far as practicable, the gains of Vatican 2; he was prepared to sacrifice perhaps hundreds of thousands to AIDS for the sake of undermining a few Western liberals. Eagleton again:

The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was neither his part in this [child-abuse] cover up nor his neanderthal attitude to women. It was the grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned - as a "culture of death" - condoms, which might have saved countless Catholics in the developing world from an agonising Aids death. 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.