E.J. Dionne Jr.: It’s Time to Fast-Track Sainthood for Pope John XXIII
E.J. Dionne Jr. is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post
The Vatican’s decision to speed Pope John Paul II on the road to sainthood aroused great elation among many Catholics — and a backlash among others in the church who see the rush as unseemly.
There is an obvious remedy that could bring contending Catholics together and send exactly the right message about the church’s attitude toward the modern world: It’s time to declare Pope John XXIII a saint....
And there is a natural link between the two papacies. When historians look back, John Paul’s greatest achievements will inevitably be seen as liberal, in the broadest sense: his commitment to human rights and religious liberty, his calls for greater social justice, his embrace of workers’ rights (“the priority of labor over capital”), and his strenuous opposition to religious prejudice. Recall that John Paul was the first pope — not counting St. Peter — to visit a synagogue, where he issued a ringing condemnation of anti-Semitism.
None of these achievements would have been possible if Pope John had not ended Catholicism’s war with modernity by calling the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. John called upon Catholics to discern the “signs of the times” and upbraided “distrustful souls” who saw in the modern era “only darkness burdening the face of the earth.”...