Lowering the Bar For Saints One of my all-time favorite war movies is called Attack. It stars Eddie Albert as Captain Cooney, the leader of Fragile Fox company in the last days of World War II. Captain Cooney is a coward who repeatedly sends only a few men into any situation and then refuses to send in back-up when they get pinned down causing many of his men to die needlessly. In one of the best lines in the movie a private, when talking about Cooney and his superior says, "When you salute those two, you have to apologize to your arm." In one of the last scenes, Cooney and several of his men are hiding in the basement of a building in a Belgian town crawling with Nazis. Cooney decides that he's going to have them all surrender. This is despite the fact that the Nazis don't know that they are there, and that one member of the company is a wounded Jewish soldier. The others explain to Cooney that the soldier won't have his POW rights honored and will ceratinly be killed. Cooney is not interested in anything but his own safety and begins to make his way to the door. Before Cooney can make it up the stairs his right hand man, Lt. Woodruff, shoots him dead. The other men consider this the most honorable thing that could have been done and convince Woodruff to say Cooney was killed by Germans so that Woodruff won't face a court martial. The soliders are saved and Cooney's commander, Lt. Col. Bartlett, goes down to the basement to investigate. Without saying so, Bartlett knows he was shot by one of his own men. Cooney's father is a judge in the town Bartlett and Cooney grew up in. Bartlett has political aspirations and promised Cooney's father he would make a war hero out of him. Because of this Barteltt is willing to play along and let Cooney be remembered as a hero who died in battle. He offers Woodruff a field promotion to take over Cooney's position which Woodruff accepts. But then Bartlett mentions that he wants to get Cooney a commendation for heroism in battle. For Woodruff this is one step too far. He was willing to let the deceased Cooney be remembered as a soldier and not a coward, but to have him declared a hero after causing so many to die was simply unacceptable. It's that same feeling I had when I heard that Pope John Paul II is to be beatified on May 1st, which would put him one step away from sainthood. Did he play a part in the Polish solidarity movement that brought in free elections? Yes! Did he try to bridge the gap between Catholicsm and other faiths like no Pope had done before? Yes! Is he a saint? Hell no! Is any man perfect -- or to put in religious terms -- does each man sin? Certainly. But there are sins and then there are SINS. And John Paul's sin is, to me, unforgivable. Let me change font size and color just so I can be abundantly clear: Pope John Paul II was responsible for the rapes of many children Now I'm not saying that he was the one who actually committed the rapes, but from a legal standpoint he is just as guilty as the pedophile priests who did the act. Let me make an analogy for you. Let's say John Paul, instead of heading the Catholic Church owned a chain of day care centers. He had gotten word that several of his employees have been doing highly wrong things to children in their care. He was worried that if news got out that there would have been a wave of bad press and the whole thing would have gone like the McMartin trial (except the McMartins were innocent) and he'd lose his business. Now let's say that Joseph Ratzinger was not the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formally the office of inquisition) and instead was the head of human resources at John Paul's day care center. He sent a memo to all of the various location managers stating that they were not to report any improper activity to the authorities but instead to tell H.R. From there H.R. would sent the workers away for some counseling and then eventually send them back to work at a different center than they worked at before but still with direct contact with children. What's the only thing missing in my analogy? Unlike Cardinal Ratzinger the H.R. Ratzinger in my analogy doesn't threaten anybody's eternal soul with excommmunication. Now if such a scenario were real and had made it to a court of law, both John Paul and Joseph would have been found guilty and been locked away in solitary confinement for their own safety. John Paul knew what then-Cardinal Ratzinger was doing. He was one of his closest advisors. Heck, this travesty has been going on for much longer than these last two popes. But that doesn't give them a pass from doing the right thing -- from protecting the most innocent among us. And let me tell you how tired I am of pointing how vile and disgusting this whole thing is, how what these two men did was so evil, and have lame excuse after lame excuse used in their defense. What? Am I being too hard on the CHILD RAPISTS?! In a legal sense that is exactly what they are. Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul made it very easy for these predators to repeatedly do the unthinkable. I don't recall John Paul ever apologizing and Benedict is too busy blaming "secular society" to apologize for his personal role in the matter. So to sum up, Pope Benedict is alive today and has been making non-apology after non-apology never admitting or apologizing for the church's role. When he made his visit to America it angered me that the various news sources were very silent about his letter which made it policy to avoid divulging information to local police. For what it's worth, he gets my wrath. John Paul is just as guilty but at least he's dead. He can't come back tomorrow and try to make amends. Just like in Attack, let's bury the sin along with the man. But now the church is fasttracking him to sainthood. They want to give an honor to a man who was the hub of so much grief and pain. Fuck him and fuck any organization that claims to be a beacon of good and righteousness and yet wants us to look up to such a man. Is it too much to asks that saints not be rapists?