Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Culture Wars

Bad Pub…..

by Jimmy Hopper

Monday morning, driving in the early morning fog to take my dogs to the Riverwalk, I turned on NPR and heard one of their detailed news items about world affairs; human interest division. This particular item had to do with the coming beatification and canonization of the recently deceased Pope John Paul II, a subject that would normally be of little or no interest to me. What grabbed my attention was a statement that rushing sainthood through would help to make the Catholic Church more “relevant” in Europe. In their rush to make themselves “relevant,” they have waived every rule of the centuries required for “sainthood” and, as the reporter stated, put John Paul on the “fast track”to sainthood. There was a five year after death wait rule. Waived. There was a long investigation into his virtues that generally takes decades. Not waived but started immediately and quickly completed; led by the Polish Cardinal who is behind the big push for beatification. There is the need for one “miracle” for beatification and one more for canonization. Lo and behold, a French nun reported last week that she prayed, not to God, mind you, but to John Paul, about her Parkinson’s Disease and she was miraculously healed. Now John Paul knew nothing of this prayer or this healing but he gets credit for the miracle. Can anyone doubt that a second miracle is forthcoming?

This follows the two previous posts regarding the “artistic” effort of making a statue of Jesus from chocolate and the on-going “selling” of the Evangelical vote. One wonders how long this “artist” studied his situation and tried to find a controversal way get his name and “art” in the papers for some “pub.” It finally came to him that connecting Christ and the chocolate candy that has become associated with Easter at Easter would deliver the proper shock value and someone would complain. At that point he could make a statement about artistic integrity akin to repudiating book burning.

One has to wonder what exactly happened between Fred Thompson and James Dobson, who was one of the key players in delivering Ohio and the presidency to George W. Bush. Probably nothing happened. Thompson probably simply didn’t pay the proper homage to Dobson, one of the godfathers of evangelism; even though his voting record as a senator is spotless regarding the issues Dobson regards as central.

And finally; back to John Paul II. I guess that, in a relativistic world; being willing to throw away all of the rules and traditions of centuries for expediency is looked upon as a virtue. If that is where they are going, it’s all irrelevant anyway. What I hate about all three of these is they are all represent “bad pub” to any thinking man. They are also bad pub to me because I name the name of Christ. However, I can live with that personally because I hold no allegiance to any of these men; don’t need to defend them, and I hope and believe that I could defend my own beliefs against this sort of thing. The real problem I have with it is that these attempts at influence peddling also name the name of Christ and that is truly offensive and disgusting to me.