I liked this line from Daniel Henninger’s editorial today in the OpinionJournal (well worth the 3 minutes read time). He was talking about Pope John Paul II and his conservativeness—his wary eye at the constant push for “compromise” and “change” and “modernization” and so on (my words):
“Change” in our time, though, is often a Trojan horse, concealing the desire not to reform but to effectively dismantle an institution by dissolving its traditions.
I couldn’t say it better.
A man who could easily match it or better it though is a thinker and writer I greatly respect, Mark Steyn, who wrote:
The assumption is always that there’s some middle ground that a less “doctrinaire” pope might have staked out: he might have supported abortion in the first trimester, say, or reciprocal partner benefits for gays in committed relationships.
The root of the Pope’s thinking – that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to – is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything’s in play, and by “consensus” all we’re really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion’s here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it’ll be something else – it’s all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block?
[…] Too many Western politicians of a generation ago – Schmidt, Trudeau, Mitterrand – failed to see what John Paul saw so clearly. It requires tremendous will to cling to the splendour of truth when the default mode of the era is to blur and evade.
[…] John Paul II championed the “splendour of truth” not because he was rigid and inflexible, but because he understood the alternative was a dead end in every sense.
And that’s simply brilliant.
Read Mark Steyn’s whole column here (5 minutes).
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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