The American Spectator

p> REREFORMATION br> Re: Wlady Pleszczynski’s Everyone’s Pope and Patrick O’Hannigan’s The Question of Motivation : /p>

I was surprised at the disgusting Catholic chauvinism, witnessed in the Spectator recently, apparently brought on by the death of John Paul II. Since there has been some speculation on what Protestants think, I’ll throw in my two cents.

I was amused by the assertion by Wlady P, “Among Christian religions, only one is the genuine article, and it’s known as Roman Catholicism.” The Pope that sat by and let children be sexually abused in an attempt to either avoid institutional embarrassment or mitigate his priest shortage is not a person who I would associate with the genuine article. Your average Protestant church would have solved this problem in short order and the solution would have involved the police not a series of out-of-court settlements. The person I associate with the genuine article is Jesus Christ. He had some interesting comments on those that abuse little ones. Will the “good” Catholics that enabled this abuse for the sake of their church meet the same fate? The Roman Catholic church looks like a typical human institution highlighted by the corruptions of power and wealth. When the institution is worshipped and not what it imperfectly represents the corruption is complete.

Concerning the free country that I was blessed to be born into, I trace the history of that freedom to a country that divorced itself of Catholicism. Our “founding fathers” seem obviously to be informed by Protestant Christianity. If Catholicism wants to associate itself with political government it would be better to associate itself with divine right monarchies and the corrupt patron governments of Central and South America. I suppose you could make the case that eventually those things would evolve into representative democracies but in the 1900s not the 1600s. I believe that Protestants won this race because they never tried to imagine infallible men other than Jesus.

My explanation of why the pope bravely confronted communism is not that he was a Catholic but that he was a Pole. He seemed less interested in Iraqi’s for instance. Recognize him for his accomplishments but please don’t try to deify him to me. He had great responsibilities and came up very short in many of them.

p>Finally we Protestants don’t have Pope envy. A study of the history of Popes will inform you that you may soon have something to fret over again because I believe you could do far worse that your last Pope. br> — Clif Briner