If only the …

On the Laura Ingraham show yesterday they played the following quote from NPR’s Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday "In the age of Aids he was very slow to respond on the issue of condoms, on what rights gays should have in society."

In response to this quote she framed what Juan Williams had said and asked Fr. Rutler to respond. I transcribed the following from her show.

Laura Ingraham: "If only the pope was for birth control, if only the pope was more modern, if only the pope wanted women to be priests. Tells us about your thoughts in hearing that."

Fr. Rutler: If only the Pope had done all those things nobody would be covering his funeral now. For a man who was so out of touch with times and so irrelevant he is getting the biggest funeral in human history. That would not have been the case if he had just gone with the flow. Look at all the religious sects, the denominations which have fallen apart because they have followed exactly the prescriptions of some of these commentators. Everyone has a right to his observations on matters of religion, but sometimes when I hear people speak off the top of their heads on these matters of theology and as a theologian I sense what the dean of the John Hopkins Medical School must think if a Christian Scientist were to discuss medicine with him. These issues that people talk about very glibly have been tried and failed miserably. That is why Pope John Paul the second said that we are living in a culture of death. Some of these issues have been reduced to political terms and they cannot be. They are not political matters. A reporter the other day, a major media reporter, said was the first non-Catholic to be elected to the papacy. These are the people who are advising the Cardinals on who the next pope should be. I have been astonished though at the coverage which is unprecedented and I think in a different way and in a different scale the media was absolutely breath taken at the popular reaction to the death of Ronald Reagan. They couldn’t understand it. Well this is on a universal scale, the death of this Pope. I think the people who have been quiet are sending a very clear message that what the Pope stood for, what he said and did, what his successor will do, contradicts the spirit of the age.