Sainthood! So we begin... John Paul is up for the big S. Been reading about it today and the various crimes of the Catholic Church. Love the tangent conversations I've found about Mother Teresa. What a great saint she is!
Lobbying for contraceptives to be made illegal, saying condoms don't work against AIDS. John Paul II did this too.
Lobbying to make abortions illegal for children who were rape victims, even in a war.
Baptizing dying people without explaining what she was doing.
Lauding Jean-Claude Duvalier the dictator for "loving the poor"
Wrote a letter to the court asking for leniency for Charles Keating, when the district attorney asked her to return the money the guy had stolen she declined.
Declined to return the money scammer Robert Maxwell gave her.
Traveled to Albania to pay respects to Enver Hoxha.
Lauded the Indian government for suspending civil liberties. "People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes."
Love this one:
Following Teresa's death in 1997, the Holy See began the process of beatification, the second step towards possible canonization, or sainthood. This process requires the documentation of a miracle. In 2002, the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumor in the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, following the application of a locket containing Teresa's picture. Monica Besra said that a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the cancerous tumor.
Besra's husband initially said that the tumor was cured by later hospital treatment. According to Monica Besra in TIME Asia (http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501021021-364433,00.html), records of her treatment were removed by a member of the order from the hospital and are now with a nun. The doctors who treated Monica Besra denied the claims of a miracle healing and said that they had come under pressure from the Missionaries of Charity to acknowledge that the healing process was the result of a miracle.
Besra's husband later withdrew his objections and attributed the healing to a miracle. A story in The Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying: "It was her miracle healing that cured my wife. Our situation was terrible and we didn't know what to do. Now my children are being educated with the help of the nuns and I have been able to buy a small piece of land. Everything has changed for the better."
So what did John Paul do?
(RC -- don't post about the Pope Prophecy. We had a lengthy discussion about that before the forums crashed and, yes, we all know about it. But you can talk about how the church is intentionally fulfilling doomsday prophecies in an attempt to consolidate power yet is also writing off African catholics for some strange reason.)
Here's a little nothing thing I found and will now post without checking the facts because I'm busy sorting mints by color and flavor:
http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=523
