The Pope
The PopeI remember once in Sydney, there was a youth rally, and there were two young girls were doing some kind of a dance routine. They got up and they got him up, and for like half minute had him sort of between him while they were doing sort of a line dance. Well, there was just that cut of film in the still picture of him with two sort of tall, Australian teenage girls seeming to dance, and he was the "Dancing pope" in Australia for the rest of the trip. I mean, you know, there was times when he really tapped his toes during a hymn, and it was a huge, huge thing. I'm sure he was aware of that. It sometimes seems, at least according to old stereotypes, that Catholics are better able to enjoy life than Protestants. Protestants have guilt without much dogma, so they have an uneasy feeling that almost anything could turn out, somehow, to be a sin. Catholics I guess are more likely to have a sense of a line that's not to be crossed: if you're on the right side of the line, you're OK. This came up in my recent post on the President's Council on Bioethics, and it may be relevant to the fact that it has often been Catholic families who have been pushing for the right to end treatment. (I think Aquinas said no one has a moral obligation to take or suffer heroic measures). And then there's, er, Monty Python, The Meaning of Life: the famous Catholic song and dance routine, "Every Sperm is Sacred," following by the rather gloomy Protestant couple who are able to practice birth control. What this means is: they have two children, and they've had intercourse twice. Pope John Paul II conveyed a strong sense of enjoying this human life on earth, and not being in any hurry to end it. I don't have anything to add to the debate about how he fought death at the end, and how the "culture of life" people supposedly regard death as something always to be fought. I just see the late Pope as saying: even if you believe in Heaven to come, hang on. Of course there is a whole Catholic teaching about the redemption of suffering, and how fortunate the believer is to share to some degree in the sufferings of Christ. Values: One of the few times I saw Allan Bloom in action, he repeated an old joke of Leo Strauss's, and added to it. Strauss, he said, used to say: the way things are going, some day we'll have a Pope who uses the word "values." Bloom concluded: Well, here we are. This relates to the question whether the Roman Catholic Church has ever had an answer to modernity (scroll down to end). |
Comments
Add Comment
Search This Site
Syndicate this blog site
Powered by BlogEasy
Free Blog Hosting