From James Carroll

Joseph,
You are wrong again.

Ms. Miesel,

"for him it was a substitute for religion" Exactly. What you seem to have an acute difficulty regarding is the efficacy of the Supernatural, be it Divine or Diabolical. Any attempt to construct a religion apart from the One True Religion, or a solution to human misery apart from the Social Kingship of Christ, is diabolical in influence--never benign. Here's the passage from the Catechism (secs. 675-676) on the dangers of Natural Messianism, in all its guises:

"675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.574 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth575 will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.576

676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,577 especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.578"

Al Gunn, I'm not wrong and you know it. Your entire arguement regarding American military action in Iraq is predicated on your belief that the American government is fundamentally illegitimate because it's not a Catholic confessional monarchy -- which, according to your perverted view of Aquinas, is the only acceptable form of government. Anybody who has ever seen your posts on any Catholic blog knows that this is what you think. Given that belief, you would believe that any presidential decision that doesn't conform to this pope's prudential views on Iraq would be both illegitimate and immoral. And if you believe that any (if not every) president, prime minister, king, etc. must conform his decisions to the prudential views of any pope on any subject, why isn't that an idolatrous view of the Church?

Moreover, you criticize Novak merely for asking why this pope wasn't as forthright about criticizing Saddam's brutality as he was criticizing America's military response. It's a legitimate question, as Mark Shea implies. Tell me, Al, do you seriously believe that no pope's prudential views should be questioned, let alone challenged? What if that pope is a thoroughly evil man, like Alexander VI or Boniface III, to name just two examples? Do you believe that a "good Catholic" must be a spineless, sycophantic lackey even in the face of evil hierarchical authority? If so, what makes your opinion any different than papolatry or ecclesiolatry?