Pope John Paul II: Most harmful person of past 25 years?

[Clutch Munny]

Originally Posted by Ronin

We all, even the poor and uneducated, have to hold ourselves accountable for our own actions (to include our own sexual behavior).

What does "uneducated" mean, in this context, if not unawareness of the consequences of actions, and/or unawareness of better options, when it comes to the spread of STDs and the prevention of pregnancy? On both fronts the church under JPII was resolutely against sexual education and the availability of prescriptions for the poorest and least autonomous, a determination particularly harmful where the local priests and nuns are the sole or major source of education and counselling, and socio-politically powerful as well.

When people are kept ignorant, thus closing off their options, hand-waving about their "accountability" is misguided and callous. I remarked in the OP that the rich, educated, and sophisticated of the West seem to find it easy to minimize the ways in which millions of others are kept poor, uneducated, and naive.

As an aside, I have found that no one is ever perfectly attuned to my own opinions, yet I know that there is a difference between disagreeing with a position and actually being harmful to others.

Nobody has said that the problem is who JPII disagreed with, so it's hard to see the relevance of this remark. The problem was the harm he did -- to men, women and children -- by refusing to regard women's rights as human rights.

One need only look at the mass of humanity currently mourning his absence to understand that the level of comfort his position and personality brought was more beneficial than malevolent.

The reasoning here is unrecoverable. Do you think Stalin wasn't mourned by millions? This man is taken as God's representative on Earth. He is regarded as a father in way that goes well beyond the metaphorical; he was genuinely trusted to be a good father by tens of millions. Of course they mourn him. Does this mitigate or exacerbate any respects in which he did not act in ways that respected their rights and well-being?

The casual weighing, moreover, of "feelings of comfort" against the misery of people's lives and deaths is hard to fathom. I don't underrate the former. But the two rather don't compare.

I think there are some better nominations for the title of "The Most Harmful Person of the Past 25 Years" than this man.

And with argument, this claim might even be made reasonable. I have no deeply vested interest in seeing JPII at the top of the list in any case; I'd just like to see a discussion of the harm he did -- one that takes the suffering of the relevant people seriously.