Postmortem

  Wow! Who’da thought everyone in the world was Catholic?! When did that happen?

Judging from the 24/7 coverage of JP2’s death/lying in state/funeral, etc., you’d think there wasn’t a Pentecostal, Buddhist, Four Square, Jew or Hindu anywhere to be found anywhere on the planet.

(Oh yeah, I forgot Muslims. Anyone remember them? That Osama guy, you know? Osama Bin Laden. Anybody? Oh, well….)

Funny. My middle name comes from the first Catholic president, who had to answer questions from reporters and charges from opponents insinuating that he’d put the Pope over the flag, his faith above his country (oh, my, what a different time that was).

Hell, just five short years ago the current president campaigned at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. The president of good ol’ B.J. U once famously insisted that the Roman Catholic church was a cult.

(Well, cultish, maybe, but certainly not a cult.)

Jeez, just two short years ago the conservative news media went into full smear mode when the very same Pope JP2 told his flock that the Iraq war was wrong.

There was a lot of bad stuff that happened on JP2’s watch, but boy you can’t fault the guy for doing his best on Iraq. Called Bush out to the Vatican woodshed and everything. Told Bush, in person, to his face, that he was doing the wrong thing. The morally wrong thing, to boot.

To no avail of course. Bush doesn’t speak Polish, never heard of Latin, and ain’t one a’ them Cat-liks anyway. If it ain’t Karl Rove doin’ the talkin, Bush ain’t doin’ any listening.

Anyway, it’s funny how things change when the political needs of the moment change. How a pope who opposed Bush on the number-one agenda item of his presidency can all of a sudden dominate Fox News.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the new unholy alliance of evangelicals and conservative Catholics will work out. They disagree on so much, really. It’s only a matter of time before they have another schism.

But for now, detente. As evidenced by the young priest I saw on Fox News this morning, talking about “it’s all about culture, really. Changing the culture.”

In other words, get set for more insane government intrustion into your private life. And we all know how responsible Catholic priests can be when they’re involved in someone’s private life.

Oops. Did I just write that?

I wrote a column about this right after the November election, saying that the religious right would force the Republican majority to forget about the war on terror and commence the war on internal dissent at home.

The usual suspects said I was crazy, controversial, “out there”, etc., like they generally do when I write columns like that.

But was I wrong?

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