How sad that Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero had never become the Pope. How sad that John Paul had no guts.


Bush vs Pope: The Greatest Evil Lies about the Greatest Hypocrite

But for all of the theoretical errors of communism and the damage done in its name, John Paul maintains that it did have one strength: the identification of alienation — or the "loss of the authentic meaning of life" — as a serious problem within modern societies.

“The savage exploitation of capitalism is the kernel of truth in Marxism….Supporters of capitalism should recognize e the good things in communism: care for the poor, everyone have a job, and health care… Blind Capitalism can crush the human spirit… Neoliberalism make the rich richer and the poor poorer,.,,
… A monstrous crime of the US is the economic blockade of Cuba…” all by John Paul the dead pope…

As former Jamaican Archbishop Samuel Carter related to me, he had personally heard the Pope voice his concern that the effects of unbridled capitalism may eventually weigh heavier on the common wealth than the past misdemeanours of atheist communism.

The first step in cutting through the materialism that infests our society is to show that, contrary to what John Locke and his libertarian admirers would have us believe, the right to private property, though an important component of freedom, is not inviolable. "The possession of material goods is not an absolute right," he claims, "and . . . its limits are inscribed in its very nature as a human right." It is essential, as he puts it in Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) that we come to conceive of our right to private property "within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone."


Embracing a view that comes perilously close to pacifism, he condemns virtually all uses of military force, including the "tragic war in the Persian Gulf."

In Centesimus Annus itself, he warns against the danger of an “idolatry” of the market, of a “radical” capitalist ideology that “in a fideistic way leaves to the free development of market forces” the solution of the problems of exploitation and marginalization. This is clearly a criticism of neoliberalism.


The result is that the social teaching of John Paul involves an ambiguous diagnosis. On the one hand, and in agreement with the body of papal teaching, he identifies the unregulated capitalist market as the primary and determinant carrier of injustice and exploitation. At the same time, under neoliberal influences, he supports theses favoring free competition, namely, that the market is intrinsically superior and the welfare state is defective.

The result is that we do not have an unequivocal identification of neoliberal capitalism as the causal factor, and this leads to ambiguous proposals. Thus, in agreement with his predecessors, John Paul judges that liberal capitalism can accept corrections that will solve the social problem. Along this line, he calls for public regulation of the market.

The German theologian Dorothee Soelle summarised the underlying rationale of liberation theology the following way: "I think by growing deaf for the cry of the poor we also make ourselves dumb. If we allow the dream that all hungry be fed - an age-old dream, a dream of mankind common to all religions - to be ruled out, we break with God. And I think that our era is aiming precisely at prohibiting the dream that all hungry will be fed."
the Vatican began to counter this new trend which it found far too political. Thus, it installed more conservative clerics, like Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, in influential positions within the Latin American Catholic Church. These clerics re-interpreted the social message in the Bible and the task of their Church as primarily of a pastoral nature concentrating on spiritual and religious welfare. This strategy gained full momentum when the current Pope, John Paul II, assumed office and appointed the arch-conservative Cardinal Josef Ratzinger to the post of chief interpreter of the Vatican's official policy. Since liberation theology's Biblical foundations are too strong to be renounced, Ratzinger did the "second-best" thing. His re-interpretation claimed that liberation theology is good as long as it confines itself to the "genuinely ecclesiastical task, i.e., the pastoral practice, touching on secular, social questions only secondarily.


An Empire in Moral Crisis

Margo Kingston in The Sydney Morning Herald states the obvious, given the sheer level of ignorance prevalent in America today, that our disaster in Mesopotamia is a result of the sheer ignorance and lack of empathy or understanding Americans have for other peoples of the world.

Is America's treatment of Iraqis a symptom of what we've become?

Our inability or attempt to understand the world we live in has resulted in treating Iraqis as "subhuman," an observation English soldiers have made. Iraqis are not blind, they see this behavior and arrogant indifference for their plight, and today's full fledged revolt is the end result.


John Paul II was jeered in Nicaragua when he said the church stood with the poor but believed Marxism was at odds with freedom.


"He said priests were becoming politicians, but he was a politician of note," said Rodrigo Paez Montealban, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University.


John Paul II was the first pope to visit Brazil; he did so four times.


His successor will face steep challenges there. Brazil has the largest number of African descendants outside Africa, and many are turning to a growing African-mysticism movement.


The Catholic Church is losing ground even faster to a growing Christian evangelical movement that has won many congressional seats and is making itself felt across Brazilian culture