Should John Paul II Get The "Mussolini Treatment"?

For the third time in ten months, the Left is having to confront the fact that the real world doesn’t cater to its retrograde worldview.

First it was the death of, and vast outpouring of love and respect for, former President Ronald Reagan. Then it was the 2004 presidential election. And now it’s the death of, and worldwide outpouring of love and respect for, Pope John Paul II.

The late Pope John Paul II is allegedly getting the so-called "Reagan treatment" and the liberal media do not like it any more than they liked Ronald Reagan.

"Many critics argue that the media are doing now what they did when former President Ronald Reagan died in June: reducing a deeply controversial figure to a warm, grandfatherly caricature," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Deeply controversial” meaning “didn’t obsequiously bow and curtsy to left-wing heresies.”

And John Paul II was “warm and grandfatherly.”

One critic peddled the current - and dubious - media line that the pope was out step with members of the Church in the West.

"This is a church with declining priests, with declining nuns, with declining church attendance," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Inquirer. "This was a very conservative pope. Most of his Western flock was not with his program."

The Catholic church in the West, like its mainline Protestant counterparts, is suffering declines in attendance because, outside of the evangelical/fundamentalist denominations, the Church in the West has done precisely what these extreme media talking heads are demanding of it: abandoned biblical doctrines and standards in favor of liberal social dogma (i.e. condoms like manna, abortion, woman and homosexuals in the clergy, etc.). You can’t throw aside the truth in favor of the fad de jour and expect any spiritual power to be left under the proverbial steeple.

Put another way, it wasn’t John Paul II that was “out of step” with his “Western flock,” but the Western flock that was out of step with their pope. And if they truly honor his memory, they’ll get into step with his “conservative program.”

Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer, a Web magazine about media coverage of religion funded by New York University's department of journalism and its Center for Religion and Media, adopted that line of attack.

"The reason we're getting sick of thinking about it is because this complicated story line is being reduced to a shallower level even than Ronald Reagan," he said. "The Pope was a figure of tremendous polarization. ... Now people are being asked to turn on a dime and consider him ... a mythic figure who had a simple and straightforward meaning."

Sounds like the LORD Jesus Himself, doesn’t it? And, oddly enough, lefties have the same general feelings about Him, which, of course, is why they’re always trying to redefine Him along their ideological lines.

Christopher Winner of United Press International, who the Inquirer noted covered both papal deaths in 1978, says the pope has been transformed in death into another one-dimensional cult celebrity. "The coverage to me is extremely manipulative. It's Hollywood coverage - it's celebrity coverage. It's uncritical. ... I'm not suggesting that he wasn't a remarkable figure - he was. But this is completely out of proportion."

Notice how he gets out on the condemnatory limb and then belatedly realizes how he’s sounding and beats a hasty, but phony, retreat.

Still, lib comments like these should be kept in mind for when, say, Jimmy Carter passes away, and these same “journalists” pump the airwaves full of effusive praise for the Squire of Plains, and recoil in shock and outrage when so much as a single conservative takes pains to render the coverage of his state funeral a little less “uncritical.”

UPDATE: Read Hunter Baker's piece in yesterday's American Spectator: "A Church, Not A Focus Group." He pretty much nails it. Money graf:

John Paul II stood for a church that insists on a real God and a real Savior Who gives absolution from real sin. He would not exchange it for any quick mess of pottage offered even in times of scandal. The dead pope is a hero of the faith. Let us pray there are many more like him.

Worlds without end, halleluliah, amen.