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Maura Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times reports today on President Bush’s plan to attend Pope John Paul II’s funeral, interpreting it as an effort to cultivate votes among Catholics:
My old boss at The American Spectator, Wlady Pleszczynski (pictured), gives us his take on the pope, and the view from Poland. The article, titled “Everyone’s Pope,” begins with the cheeky assertion that
I have not been able to read everything, but, so far, it seems that The Sunday Times has the most developed, lovely version of the final moments of Pope John Paul II, complete with lots of clear attributions for sources. Here is a major piece of this triple-byline feature, starting with the pope struggling to dictate a mesage to his secretary:
Here is a lovely little Associate Press feature about an element of the pope’s life that has been hard to imagine in the past decade or so of sickness and decline — John Paul II the athlete. The story also includes a reference to what may be the first miracle of his papacy: “He has been a terrific sportsman,” said George Weigel, author of a biography of John Paul. A key clip: “As a young man he was a very active soccer player, a skier, a hiker. As a young priest he became very involved in a ministry to university students built around hiking, skiing and kayaking. . . . The first 15 years of his pontificate he took breaks to go skiing, and the miracle about that was the Italian paparazzi actually left him alone.” Anyone see any good photos from this era?
The mainstream media are now working their way out of the hands-clutching-rosaries stage of their coverage, after a marathon of anchorpersons trying to project nonstop sympathy for the pope and those who loved him. Now we are transitioning into the serious coverage that will resemble the New Hampshire primary with vestments and incense (more on that later). The faux-political polls ought to start coming out any minute now.
Slate‘s JPII lineup is less than ideal. First we get two articles that ran in 2003 — one moderately interesting explanation of how the voting will go for the next pope and a piece by Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman that makes a lot of jokes without really handicapping the race for the next pope. Then we have a short, bloodless exchange between the “Catholic Right vs. the Catholic Left on John Paul II’s Legacy.” The partners in dialogue are Michael McGough and Deal Hudson. And — yes — Hudson does use much of his space to flak for Republicans. Christopher Hitchens weighs in with his usual drunken bombast, but this denunciation doesn’t even rise to the level of his attempt to pour cold water on Ronald Reagan. Rounding out the coverage is a summary of today’s newspapers and a piece by television critic Dana Stevens, who complains that network coverage is turning the pope’s “death agony into a peepshow,” which is “accompanied by blow by blow by perky newscasters.” Better, please.
This, dear readers, is what the editors of The Palm Beach Post think of the religion beat and any traditional Catholic and Christian readers who remain on their subscription lists.
As one would expect, the best newspaper in Florida is continuing to cover the Terri Schiavo case, even as the national and global media focus on events at the Vatican. Here is a direct link to The St. Petersburg Times website dedicated to the life and death of Terri. The news for today is that the precise location of her body and its immediate fate remain unknown. There also is a roundup of clergy views on the case, most of which are pro-life, and, from recent coverage, a profile of the other woman in Michael Schiavo’s life. As the pope story grows, this link is the one to keep for the aftermath of the Schiavo drama.
For those following the post-Christian Science Monitor Iraq story, Robert F. Worth of The New York Times has a new wrinkle. There is another sign that the Sunni leaders are not united, and what a symbolic sign it is — a group of clerics have urged their followers to join the Iraqi police. The key: “The edict, signed by 64 imams and religious scholars, was a striking turnaround for the clerics, who have often lashed out in sermons at the fledgling army and police force and branded them collaborators. Prominently missing from the signers was Harith al-Dari, the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars and one of the most influential Sunni Arab clerics in Iraq, who is said to have close ties to the insurgency. Still, the directive, which carried the signature of Ahmed Hassan al-Taha, an imam at an important Baghdad mosque who has been a strong critic of the occupation, seemed to represent a significant step.”
