Vendetta wrote:
Part of the society he lived in? You mean the one he was in autocratic control over?
He was in a position of great power, one that could do great good or great harm, and in many ways he did a lot of harm. Personally I think that outweighs the good he did.
Very true, but he also grew up as a Catholic, and probably felt that the Church was right and that its points of view, dogma, etc, were the correct ones. Obviously, or he never would have become a Pope. So since he was old enough to form cognizant thought his society (parents, friends, priests, etc) told him the Church was the way, the truth, etc.
It is true that people can, and many times do, break out of the moulds of their youth, but at the same time many do not, or follow the paths subconsciously: children of abusers frequently become abusers themselves, even if they are aware of it and try not to be.
I do indeed find it disappointing that he did not confront the pedophilia in the Church with the same moral conviction and head-on courage with which he confronted dictators and Communism. When the time came to face corruption in his own backyard, he faltered. He does indeed deserve rebuke for that.
But look at the problems the Church had before: priests that want to marry (not dally with children, but marry normally), gays or lesbians in the Church, ordaining woman, the refusal to acknowledge birth control or the spread of AIDS-- these are problems endemic to Catholic dogma as a whole, not things that JP-II pulled out of his own ass.
If the Catholic Church had been a paragon of tolerance and an enemy of bigotry until he took over, and then became sexist, phobic, and corrupt, then yeah, I say vilify away. But that wasn't the case. He didn't clean up problems in his own ranks, but he did confront needed enemies-- the cruelty of the Communist regime in Eastern Europe, for one. When other Popes, in the past, had been accused of complicity with such things as Nazi cruelty and aggression, JP-II didn't follow that course.
What of the admonition to remove the log from your own eye before pointing out the splinter in others, or being without sin before casting a stone? He failed to heed that. He did, indeed, lead the Church through years of hypocrisy. But he didn't cower before dictators and human-rights abusers in government, either.
His weakness was his inability to see his mother Church as a fallable beast. It is, always has been, and will be. But that is the nature of religions and those who lead them, and in that JP-II was no different than any mortal man.