The Deafening Silence of Pope John Paul II

John Paul II has lost his voice. But he speaks very clearly in his latest book, "Memory and Identity." In it, he deeply criticizes Western democracies. Two eminent scholars discuss the book's theses.

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, March 3, 2005 – John Paul II is silent; he has nearly lost his voice. But he continues to make an uproar, unsettling the Church and the world, hurling himself dauntlessly against what he considers the modern plague of the West: "subtle totalitarianism" under the cover of democracy, which carries out with impunity its slaughters of the innocents, the embryo-persons.

Both of these things happened at once on Thursday, February 24. The pope returned to the hospital for the last station of his Way of the Cross, that of silence. But on the same day his latest book, "Memory and Identity," arrived in bookstores in Italy and occupied the columns of newspapers all over the world. The volume is anything but reassuring. On only one other occasion in more than twenty-six years as pope has Karol Wojtyla made such stern statements against the killing of the unborn, which may be democratic, but is never legitimate in his view: in the 1995 encyclical "Evangelium Vitae."

In "Memory and Identity," John Paul II reasons on the limit that democratic parliaments must never transgress: the natural law inscribed within every man, even the one farthest from God.

The force of his reasoning is what irritates Catholics and secularists alike. Because the natural law that the pope invokes is not only a matter of the Church.

More here.