I commented yesterday how outlets such as Fox News have laid hold of the Pope’s death to trumpet the “Culture of Life”, and wholly ignoring all of the Pope’s related comments on his increasing awareness that war solves nothing. The Pope criticized the bombings of Iraq in 1998, and Kosovo (even though the Kosovo bombings were aimed at stopping ethnic cleansing, the cost of such to still more human lives seemed unacceptable to the Pope. But not a peep about this. The Pope must be turning over in his grave (or rather, observing with grief how his words are so selectively used to further one political agenda. Then again, perhaps the people in the afterlife are not permitted to view the struggles of earth, for it would be too troublesome and frustrating to behold the blindness that has people groping about and destoying each other.
Fox News, SHUT UP! The Fox Netwrk; The World According to Fox/Murdoch/GOP; The Fox (Black) Hole (of truth); they’re disgusting.
Read below some of the “non-reported”, yea even “ommitted” or “edited” and oft-repeated by the vatican so that the message is crystal clear. Not with Fox or with the Religious Right. They’ve had quite a career of practice at selective interpretations and treatment of that WHOLE BIBLE they purport to “believe in”.
In Evangelium Vitae (1995), the Pope claimed, “Among the signs of hope we should also count the spread, at many levels of public opinion, of a new sensitivity ever more opposed to war as an instrument for the resolution of conflicts between peoples, and increasingly oriented to finding effective but ‘nonviolent’ means to counter the armed aggressor” (emphasis in original). Beneath the Pope’s expressed trust in nonviolence, one finds an esteem for those who show a willingness to suffer for the sake of justice rooted in the Christian faith. “It is by uniting his own sufferings for the sake of truth and freedom to the sufferings of Christ on the Cross,” Pope John Paul wrote, “that man is able to accomplish the miracle of peace and is in a position to discern the often narrow path between the cowardice which gives in to evil and the violence, which under the illusion of fighting evil, only makes it worse.”
This last point, namely, that there are forms of fighting evil that only worsen the evils suffered, is one that Pope John Paul II makes often. In his view, however, the avoidance of greater harm is more than a simple question of proportionality. Rather, the Pope affirms that those who are themselves willing to accept suffering acquire a heightened ability to discern properly how to fight against evil, whether with nonviolence or by the legitimate use of force. There is an implicit rejection of the notion that just-war thinking is simply an abstract “calculus” that can be applied independent of certain restrained, not to say pacific, moral dispositions. The Pope’s antipathy to the use of force and his constant call for negotiation disclose a religious leader who is as much concerned about the means employed to overcome evil as he is committed to struggle against it.
That’s pretty profound stuff from the Pope. I don’t agree with everything he said about other issues, but I commend his consistent life ethic.
This actually ties in rather well with today’s Gospel reading in the Lectionary:
John 20:19:
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
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In the midst of the fear of the disciples after his resurrection, Jesus tells them, and I would even say he also tells us, “Peace be with you.”