Part of the Flock Felt Abandoned by the Pope

LA Times reported Half a world away, millions of people came together last week to mourn Pope John Paul II, but you'll hear no tearful elegies from believers such as Nery Amaya, a Catholic for all of her 28 years.

As she made the rounds as a CARE volunteer in this impoverished town, she remembered the time she offered to start a parish program to help gang members. Her priest suggested that she devote her energies to Easter week decorations instead.

Amaya charges that under the late pope, the church was too timid in its ministry to the needy, and maintains that John Paul's efforts to put the brakes on social activism cost the Latin American Catholic Church membership as well as momentum in the fight against poverty and injustice.

"The church has to come down from heaven to the reality on Earth," Amaya said. "It's not filling my spiritual needs, and I am looking for an alternative."

You can always find someone dissatisfied with just about anything, but I have heard many news reports that said under John Paul II the Catholic Church grew the most in Latin America and Africa

Hugh Hewitt blogged More Roman Catholic Church Bashing from the Los Angeles Times. This is an incredible piece of propaganda, a thinly disguised appeal for "revival of liberation theology," based on a half dozen quotes from various speakers in Latin America. Couldn't the Los Angeles Times at least get a "time-of-day" quote from their hometown Cardinal Mahoney? Evidently not.) Another "Legacy of John Paul II" article is titled "Attendance Is a Concern for Church," a Larry Stammer piece that again seizes on the Church's stances on birth control, celibacy, and women priests to explain the paper's view of the challenege to the Church's credibility, even as he concedes: "In terms of actual numbers, the worldwide Catholic population grew by almost 10 million in 2003 to a total of 1.07 billion worldwide, according to a Vatican report. But the percentage of Catholics in the overall world population edged slightly down in 2003." The Stammer piece repeatedly cherry-picks data to build a case that the Church's orthodoxy is crippling its appeal, when exactly the opposite case can be made using different data sets.

Steve Bainbridge blogged LA Times reporters Chris Kraul and Henry Chu offer up a remarkably biased screed against Pope John Paul II's crack down on liberation theology in Latin America. They quote numerous leftist activists who criticize the late Pontiff, but not a single critic of liberation theology. Worse yet, they basically dismiss as false the well-documented links between liberation theology and armed Marxist movements. As Father Richard John Neuhaus aptly summarized those links, however, liberation theology essentially "equates Jesus with Che Guevara."