Vulgata: the Latest Thing: Femme Power Icon Brutally Slain

The Latest Thing is (or was orwill be) a monolithic New York Times or Globe and Mail-type newspaper published at any point in the future or past that we use for the purpose of satire.
-- Editor

By Lawrence Lam and Daniel Santoro

Now more than 25 years after his death, the canonization process for former Pope John Paul II continues with as much momentum as ever. Despite harsh criticism faced by the Vatican from many of his own faithful, Pope Pius XIV is insisting on pushing ahead with the canonization process for his predecessor.

The controversy stems from an extremely revealing historical account entitled John Paul II: Morgentaler’s Pope, that casts new light on the man whom some ironically describe as ‘saintly’. It is written by Sr. Lilith Proddy, a professor of Women’s and Children’s Health Issues at Mary Magdalene University. She explains in her book “even throughout the reign of Pope John Paul II in the late 20th century, there was hard scientific evidence on the horror of abortion. Both the nature of the inhumane destruction of the unborn child and the harmful health effects of abortion were well established by that point.” It is calculated that millions of unborn children were massacred in North America alone during his reign as Supreme Pontiff. “At best, the patriarchy of the Catholic Church was resoundingly silent; at worst, supportive of the horror of abortion.” She adds, “there can be no excuse for inaction in the face of such violent human rights violations”. Sr. Proddy goes on to skillfully argue that the tragedy of abortion was in fact the historical result of the anti-woman attitude of the Catholic Church throughout history. “The Church has a lot of blood on her hands”, she says.
A quick scan of Catholic culture at the time easily fills in the historical gaps. Surveys uncovered from the period reveal that over 80% of Catholics routinely answered that they were “pro-choice”, a covert label for those who supported abortion rights and all their horror. Despite its wide spread occurrence in society, virtually no homilies at any Catholic masses even mentioned the word ‘abortion’, less discussed the issue substantially. Dr. Jonah Hinkins, S.T.L., a scholar on Church

politics from the Mercy Institute agrees, “They knew what was going on yet the Pope and the bishops allowed it to happen. They gave no pastoral direction and allowed this tragedy to continue as if it wasn’t any of their business.” John Paul II himself met extensively and publicly with pro-choice politicians of his time, many of whom were themselves self-proclaimed Catholics. Often, such politicians were

honoured by their bishops with large funerals in Catholic Cathedrals. “John Paul chose to have World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto, thus conferring great honour on what was perhaps the capital city of the abortion culture. And in his appearances in front of as much as a million people, the Pope took no opportunity to mention abortion by name, but made do with some merely passing and vague remarks about building a ‘culture of life’”. Pro-abortion groups such as “Catholics for a Free Choice”, which flourished under John Paul and his bishops, were reportedly also at the event distributing their literature without any intervention from those in charge.
All this and more is to be found in Morgentaler’s Pope, a highly readable and educational account of one of the many failings of John Paul II and the Catholic Church. Evidently, the Church has not taken lessons from its past errors. John Paul II’s canonization will truly go down in history as the latest in a long series of Catholic errors, including the highly criticized canonization of St. Pius XII, widely condemned for spear-heading the participation of the Catholic Church in the holocaust, and the Church’s anti-scientific condemnation of Galileo, who refused to believe that the sun goes around the earth.