http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=128&e=12&u=/ucwb/deathforthepope

http://tinyurl.com/3n4al

Death for the Pope

By William F. Buckley Jr. 

At church on Sunday the congregation was asked to pray for the
recovery of the pope. I have abstained from doing so. I hope that he
will not recover. 

The seizure brought on by his dramatic trip to the hospital a week ago
suggests the international sense of his indispensability. Pope John
Paul (news - web sites) is a graphic figure in the lives of Catholics
and many non-Catholics. He is, of course, a towering theological
figure who has presided over the development of Catholic thought and
practice for the 26 years of his papacy. He is a major historical
figure, who began as a Catholic seminarian in a Poland subservient
first to a Nazi overlord (they hanged him in Nuremberg), then to a
communist overlord (nothing happened to him -- the communists are
never prosecuted). From that scene he succeeded to the Holy See, where
he was the symbol of hope and, after the communists fell, of triumph,
distinctive in his bid for international recognition as a God-fearing
man of good will. 

I remember him as he was leaving Havana to return to Rome. Fidel
Castro (news - web sites) was there to recite the diplomatic
amenities. The pope was standing on the gangway of his airplane and
suddenly rain fell. As John Paul spoke under an improvised parasol,
his three-minute farewell address evolved, in near-perfect Spanish,
into a homily on water's purifying mission. All of Cuba watched on
television, no doubt hoping, for an exhilarating moment, that Castro
would melt away, Cuba shriven from the antipodal reign of a tyrant who
came to power even before the pope did, and will outlast him. 

Unless it were to happen that Castro died tomorrow, and the pope a
week later; but we must see through the blur of the rain to realities
of the day, which are that the pope almost died the day that he was
taken to the hospital. "We got him by a breath," one medico leaked the
news, and another said, "If he had come in 10 minutes later, he would
have been gone." 

The temptation is, always, to pray for the continuation of the life of
anyone who wants to keep on living. The pope is one of these. In the
past, he recorded that he did not plan ever to abdicate, that he would
die on the papal throne. It is presumptuous, in thinking about John
Paul, to suppose that in arriving at that decision he was motivated by
vainglory. What exactly he had in mind we do not know, but can
reasonably assume that he was asserting pride in physical fortitude,
consistent with his days as a mountain climber and a skier. Perhaps
there is an element of vanity there. Not many sovereigns leave the
throne, except at the hands of embalmers. 

There is the further question, distinctive to the throne of St. Peter.
To leave it before death can be construed as forsaking a mission
charged by God almighty. That isn't the consensus of theologians. 

Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican (news - web sites)'s secretary of
state, said simply, "If there is a man who loves the Church more than
anybody else, who is guided by the Holy Spirit ... that's him. We must
have great faith in the pope. He knows what to do." 

What to do includes clinging to the papacy as a full-time cripple, if
medicine, which arrested death by only 10 minutes, can arrest death
again for weeks and even months. But the progressive deterioration in
the pope's health over the last several years confirms that there are
yet things medical science can't do, and these include giving the pope
the physical strength to coordinate and to use his voice intelligibly.

So, what is wrong with praying for his death? For relief from his
manifest sufferings? And for the opportunity to pay honor to his
legacy by turning to the responsibility of electing a successor to get
on with John Paul's work? Muriel Spark commented in "Memento Mori":
"When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it
reveals, but the first days of immortality." That cannot be effected
by the hospital in which the pope struggles.






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"[M]y ministry is that of servus servorum Dei."
--Pope John Paul II (Ut Unum Sint, no. 88)

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock
I will build my church, and the powers of death
shall not prevail against it."
--Matthew 16:18 
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