Pope John Paul II's legacy

That marvelous old sinner Christopher Hitchens assesses the pope's legacy, which is rather mixed. The intersection of religion, politics, and liberalism is a perilous one; I suppose John Paul II did as much as any product of World War II and Vatican II could have, but was hopeless when we demanded the prosecution of child abusers who found sanctuary in a bureaucracy that hid them in clouds of incense:

A church that has allowed no latitude in its teachings on masturbation, premarital sex, birth control, and divorce suddenly asks for understanding and "wiggle room" for the most revolting crime on the books.

Hitchens errs only when he descends to the snarkiness that comes too easily for him, in a passage in which he can't resist rapping his favorite bugaboo -- the complicity between organized religion and the state -- on the knuckles. He whizzes past his historical analogy so fast that the ironies fail to resonate:

Actually, the Kennedy brothers were part of a Catholic cabal which imposed another Catholic cabal on the luckless people of South Vietnam. It's impossible to read the history of that calamity without noticing the filiation between the detested Diem dynasty in Saigon and the Kennedys, Cardinal Spellman, and various Catholic Cold-War propagandists from Luce to Buckley. However, there's no proof that the Vatican ordered this, and the Kennedys did repent by having Diem murdered, so perhaps we can let that one slide.

Paging Oliver Stone...