Ouch!

The following quotation is from Tim Cavanaugh's Irrational Enquiry: Did Pope John Paul II get what he wanted?

Having put his faith into the struggle against the greater evil of communism, [Pope John Paul II] emerged into a world governed by the culture of death and the logic of the market, where people are aborted, euthanized, cloned, and starved to death for the convenience of the living, where Catholics largely ignore their church's teachings in the bedroom and the voting booth, the priesthood is a disgraced profession, and men, in St. Paul's memorable phrase, have left the natural uses of women and burn in their lust one toward another. From the pope's standpoint, the years since 1978 have not been an uncomplicated triumph but a draining, ambiguous effort that served the interests mainly of secular sybarites. Worst of all, these same worldly secularists now claim the pope as one of their own, invoking his victories as something we can all share.

That's not Cavanaugh's ultimate message, but I can't help but feel he's right.

And then as Christopher Hitchens says in Papal Power: John Paul II's other legacy, complaining about the Pope's inaction over the child sexual abuse scandal,

No obituary about John Paul II...will omit to mention that he exerted enormous force to change the politics of Poland. Well, good for him, I would say. (He behaved much better on that occasion than he did when welcoming Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein's most blood-spattered henchmen, to an audience at the Vatican and then for a private visit to Assisi.)