Posted by
KsReaganite on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:58:22 PM
One of the misfortunes of Pope Benedict XVI is that he, a scholar and public intellectual of the highest calibre, had to step into shoes that were simply gigantic: it is a hard act to follow someone like the beloved, larger than life John Paul II.
Yet, he is trying to live up to the level of courage displayed by his saintly predecessor. For one, Pope Benedict has had no qualms stating the unpopular truth to the most powerful men and women in the world. The most powerful nominal Roman Catholic in the most powerful country on the planet, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, found that out rather bluntly this week.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090219/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_us_pelosi_14
No wonder, her staff had nothing to say about the matter. If anything, she should be thankful that she is not in a diocese like Denver or St. Louis or Lincoln, Nebraska, where the bishops would have made sure that she stopped her charade of claiming to be Catholic while forcing Americans to pay for infanticide at the same time.
The Pope's blunt remonstrance of Speaker Pelosi reminded me faintly of the words of his predecessor more than a decade ago at Foxboro Stadium in Boston. Those were words that offended just about every liberal Democrat and conservative Republican politician there and yet kept faith with the absolute truths as held by the Roman Catholic Church, "We must welcome as children of God those who are undocumented and those who are unborn."
I may not have agreed with that entire sentence of JPII, but heck, if that was not moral courage I don't know what moral courage is.