Remembering a Sometimes Progressive Pope

Not to belabor papal issues, but here's a pretty good article about the late John Paul II. Mrowka has some pretty good comments about how JPII's definition of the phrase "culture of life" has been hijacked and truncated to refer almost solely to abortion by neo-con politicians in the US.

For the late pope, the culture of life was a (as I've read elsewhere) "seamless garment." While it included abortion, it also included opposition to state-sponsored death (war, capital punishment, genocide) and took into account the ways that societies enable a culture of death by creating conditions which perpetuate poverty and turn a blind eye to disease (think HIV/AIDS in Africa). But where does your average Republican politician stand on these issues? When is the last time that you heard a neo-con pundit talking about the culture of life in relation to the 100,000+ civilian deaths that resulted from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (according to Johns Hopkins University study)?


(This is my last pope post -- I promise :-)