The Beatification of John Paul II

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"The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish."

John Paul II
(1920–2005)

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I'm not Catholic so I suppose today's beatification of the late John Paul II really shouldn't mean anything to me.

And, for the most part, I guess, it doesn't.

I was raised in a Protestant church. The only times I have attended a Catholic church were when I was someone's guest — or, 20 years ago this summer, when I was the pallbearer at the funeral for a friend.

Sainthood for John Paul — or anyone else — simply isn't a concern for me. I have my own idea of what I think makes a person a saint.

I always felt my mother was a saint although she isn't going to be recognized by anyone. Nevertheless, I still think she had all the qualities one looks for in a saint.

Anyway, go ahead, make John Paul a saint, urges Peggy Noonan, remembering the pope's triumphant return to Poland in 1979, less than a year after entering the papacy.

I don't think Noonan is Catholic — to be honest, I'm not sure, really, what her faith happens to be — and if she isn't, her opinion on the matter probably means no more than mine.

However, if she is a Catholic, Noonan shows how little she knows about the process — or, at least, the terminology involved. The church says it does not make anyone a saint. A higher power does that. Instead, the church recognizes that someone is a saint.

I do remember the occasion of which Noonan writes, and I agree with what she says. It was "[o]ne of the greatest moments in the history of faith," she writes, and it "was also one of the greatest moments in modern political history."

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And I remember when they gathered to say goodbye to John Paul a little more than six years ago. There was a growing movement at the time to put him on the fast track to sainthood ...

... Which, Reuters suggests now, may be a little too fast.

Actually, that doesn't really bother me, I guess, although I suppose I am sort of accustomed to the idea that those who are designated as saints are people who were dead before I was born.

Like, for example, the people in the Bible. I know that, if those people really lived, they were dead centuries before I came along. I have no image in my personal memory bank of any of those folks — the way I have for John Paul. He isn't just an historical figure to me the way he increasingly will become to others. I remember when he was flesh and blood.

I remember, too, when Ronald Reagan was flesh and blood. I didn't agree with him most of the time, either, yet he is treated like a saint by many now.

Today, also, those two men get most of the credit for the downfall of communism. I tend to think that many people played roles in that. John Paul and Reagan contributed to it, but I believe it was the combination of the resistance of ordinary people and the words of national and religious leaders over a period of several decades that, working together, brought down communism.

Reportedly, there are more than 10,000 saints, and my best guess would be that nearly all of them were before my time.

But there have been people who have lived during my lifetime whose works certainly qualify them for canonization — and the late pope is one of them.

I didn't agree with John Paul on everything, but I did respect him, and I have no problem if the Catholic church wants to recognize him as a saint.

During his lifetime and since his death, John Paul was and is symbolic of the reconciliation the church always seeks with those it deems to be spiritually adrift.

John Paul, the first Polish pope, believed he was drawn into the priesthood in part because of the events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and his successor, Benedict XVI, the first German pope in more than four centuries, had been a member of the "Hitler Youth."

They came from opposite sides of the tracks, you might say.

(Benedict became a member of the Hitler Youth only because it was required by law, and neither he nor the members of his family advocated Hitler or nazism.)

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Thus, there is clearly a symbolic quality to the very act of this German pope presiding over the beatification of his predecessor, the Polish pope.

It signifies the reconciliation of the modern Catholic church with its uncomfortable history, notably the Reichskonkordat that the Vatican signed with Nazi Germany to ensure church rights.

So perhaps this is a good occasion to revisit the meaning of the word saint.

To be a saint is to be regarded as a holy person. Name your biblical passage, and the meaning comes down to the belief that Christ dwells in that person, here on earth and in the afterlife. I suppose that could be said of just about any Christian leader, but the belief that one is a saint is a conviction that that person is exceptional.

I don't know if John Paul was exceptional or not. But if he helped his church finally come to terms with its uneasy past, then that is saintly, in my book.

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A Cold Case Revisited

We live in an imperfect world.

Consequently, there are some mysteries that always will remain unresolved.

It is unlikely, for example, that we will ever know

• what happened to Amelia Earhart, or


• if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone — or if he even participated — in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or


• if D.B. Cooper survived his leap from the Boeing 727 he hijacked in November 1971 and lived for awhile — or continues to live — on the $200,000 ransom he received, or


• the identity (or identities) of the person (or persons) buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Those topics continue to make for lively discussions that no one ever wins and no one ever loses.

Nevertheless, some people spend their lives trying to solve the cold cases that perplex the rest of us.

Sometimes they succeed in tying up all the loose ends. Most of the time, they don't.

Sometimes, investigators know the answers they seek. They just lack sufficient proof to make their case hold up in a court of law, and they spend years sifting through the evidence they do have, hoping to find something that has been overlooked.

Sometimes that hard work pays off, and the guilty person is finally brought to justice.

Sometimes it doesn't pay off.

Sunday was the fifth anniversary of the still–unsolved disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway during a high school graduation trip to Aruba.

Holloway hasn't been seen since May 30, 2005, and no one really knows what happened to her. Most people assume she is dead. I've heard some people speculate that she was sold into white slavery. Others have said that she has been held hostage somewhere for the last five years.

There's always a lot of conflicting information in a missing person case. In this case, the missing person's parents believed what most parents probably believe of their own children — she was a good kid, she didn't drink or use drugs, she was a virgin. But the authorities put together a different picture — one of a young girl who drank excessively, at least when she was far away from home. If she was like others in her age group, she may have been sexually experienced and/or may have experimented with drugs.

Holloway's mother and stepfather descended upon Aruba almost immediately after she failed to show up for the flight home, and they apparently ran roughshod over the local authorities in their pursuit of justice. They did uncover some plausible leads (as well as some bogus ones). And the primary suspects — Dutch national Joran van der Sloot and two friends of his — produced some plausible rebuttals (as well as some bogus ones).

There may be some truth in what both sides have said — and there may have been some self–serving aspects as well. A lot really isn't known about the night Natalee disappeared.

What is known is that a lot of drinking was done by Holloway and her fellow graduates on the trip. Holloway may have been one of the worst offenders. The head of the original investigation said they had learned Holloway "drank all day every day" during the trip.

Now, make no mistake. If she had been on a five–day drinking binge, that didn't justify someone else exploiting her inebriation to sexually assault her, to kidnap or to kill her.

And, even if van der Sloot's mildest account of the events of that night (and he apparently has had more than one) — that he and his friends left a beautiful, young (and, presumably, intoxicated) girl alone on the beach at night at her request — turns out to be true, doesn't it seem plausible that he should be held criminally liable? After all, if that particular story can be believed, he was the sober one, as well as a resident of the island. She was intoxicated, a tourist, unfamiliar with the terrain.

Wasn't he, at the very least, negligent to leave her alone like that?

And then there have been the other versions he has told under various circumstances — one of killing her on the beach and another of selling her into slavery.

Well, at the end of the day, we're left with contradictory accounts, no body, no crime scene, no evidence that a crime was committed, although the fact that Natalee hasn't been heard from in more than five years now seems to be pretty compelling evidence that something happened to her. But what happened? Was she killed? Or is she being held somewhere against her will?

Maybe we'll get some answers now.

On the fifth anniversary of Holloway's disappearance, a woman named Stephany Flores was murdered in a hotel room in Lima, Peru. Today, van der Sloot was taken into custody in Santiago, Chile, and is being flown back to Peru, where he apparently will be charged with the slaying.

There appears to be a certain amount of hope in Holloway's family that, with van der Sloot in custody and facing a murder charge in Peru, the missing person case will be reopened in Aruba.

I'm sure it must be hard for Holloway's family, not knowing where she is or what became of her. And I hope they get some answers. But they might not.

Some mysteries never are solved.

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The Turning Point

After winning the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush said he had acquired "political capital" during the campaign.

It didn't take him long to squander it, though.

And I believe that he began running through his stash on this day five years ago.

For it was on this day that Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at her husband's request.

The Terri Schiavo case has to rank as one of the saddest episodes in recent American life. It would have been a tragic matter even if it had remained private, involving only Schiavo's biological family, her spouse and her doctors.

But it was made even more tragic — not to mention shameful — by the way that public figures and politicians, mostly Republicans (but some Democrats as well) and from the White House on down, elbowed their way in.

Just to provide a little background — a little refresher, unpleasant though it is, to put things in perspective — Schiavo collapsed in her home in February 1990. She suffered respiratory and cardiac arrest, but she survived, although there was considerable brain damage, leaving her in what is called a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS), which is a state of very deep unconsciousness.

Before the Schiavo case came along, there were really only two instances of PVS that had been in the news in my memory:

1. Sunny von Bülow, who suffered severe brain damage in 1980 and remained in a PVS until her death nearly 30 years later.


2. Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman who lost consciousness after a night of partying in 1975 and lapsed into a PVS, igniting a legal battle that resulted in significant precedents in right–to–die law.

There were other cases, I'm sure, but those are the ones I remember being prominent in the news. Suffice to say, PVS was not something with which most people were familiar, even five years ago.

Anyway, there had been a lot of legal wrangling by the lawyers representing Schiavo's husband and her parents, especially since 1998. Her husband wanted to remove her life support; her parents wanted to prevent that from happening.

By 2005, the case had reached a crossroads. No matter which way it went, it seemed, there was no turning back. And all sorts of prominent people — Jesse Jackson, the governor of Florida (Jeb Bush), the majority leader of the U.S. Senate (Bill Frist), the speaker of the House (Dennis Hastert) and the president of the United States (George W. Bush) — intervened, ostensibly because they were pro–life, when the judicial machinery appeared to be favoring Schiavo's husband.

Their involvement turned a private family tragedy into a national debate.

And there were times when it bordered on the bizarre.

Like when Frist, a doctor by training as well as professional experience prior to his entry into politics, opposed removing Schiavo's life support on the basis of what he had seen in a video tape. Frist was an experienced surgeon who had performed more than 100 heart and/or lung transplants. But he was not a neurologist. And he was criticized by many for making such a crucial diagnosis based only on a video tape.

Many denounced the involvement of both the Congress and the White House in the Schiavo matter. For my part, I have always been fond of the editorial that ran in the Boston Globe, which stated, "The US Congress has no place at Terri Schiavo's bedside. Neither does the president of the United States."

At the conclusion of a strongly worded editorial, the Globe wrote, "They say they are doing God's work, but should consider that it is man's machinery that has prolonged this sad shell of a human being. All religions teach that there is a time to let go."

Their reluctance to let go amid their protestations that they were pro–life understandably made many people suspicious a few months later, when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, producing the kind of death and destruction that is rarely seen on this continent.

At that time, when TV cameras transmitted images of the catastrophe that was unfolding, Americans were baffled and, frankly, frightened by the delayed response they saw coming from the government at all levels. Black Americans wondered — not without some justification — if, considering that New Orleans was disproportionately black compared to most North American cities, racism had played a role. After all, those who had so loudly proclaimed that they were pro–life in March, when the life of one white woman with PVS was on the line, seemed strangely silent when many thousands of black Americans were drowning or their homes were being destroyed in a major flood.

In more than two centuries, Americans have seldom re–elected a president who has already served a full four–year term. Whenever they have done so, whether by a wide margin or a slim one, there is a strange phenomenon that seems to occur. The very act of re–electing a president who was elected in his own right seems to be perceived as an endorsement of the public's collective wisdom.

And that, in turn, seems to produce a reservoir of good will for the president, even among those who voted against him. Maybe that is what Bush was talking about when he said he had earned political capital.

If so, I believe he — and Congress, although Congress seldom gets good marks from the public, no matter which party is in the majority — used up most of it with partisan and transparently political actions in the Schiavo case. And, like the budget surplus that Bush inherited from the Clinton administration and then wantonly squandered before the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was gone when he really needed it.

Starting on this day in 2005, I believe Bush irretrievably lost the public's support and laid the foundation for Republican electoral defeats in the next two elections.

It may have been the most rapid decline in public support for a president who had just been re–elected in American history.

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