Il Papa

El Papa murio. Mortum est. Viva el papa.

He was a great man. One the likes of which we may never see again. His presence was undeniable. Love him, hate him, no one can deny his reach, his charisma, his grandeur. People talk about someone having "it", the unnameable but indisputable quality of remarkable existence. He had it. Of that there is no conceivable doubt.

He spoke at great lengths of the culture of life and its shadowy counterpart, the culture of death. He opened a door, he shed great light by this distinction. Unfortunately he could not always follow it through to the end. The center, sadly, did not always hold.

He toppled Communism. It will take a successor from The Third World to do the same for rampant, godless, flatland capitalism.

There are cultures of life and cultures of death. Every wave of development includes and therefore excludes. There are those that count, those within a person or a culture's frame and therefore are granted life. There are those who outcast, and are dealt the blow of death and humiliation.

Each stage of development has its own culture of life and death. To have a culture of life necessarily co-creates its shadow. We are never innocent. We must always use power to protect, but by using power therefore abuse others. We deal blows of death and grant mercies of life every day, in every moment in every action. We are never innocent. The entire universe is a great Cosmic Sacrifice. A great radiance as well. A Great Paschal Mystery, a Feast of Thanksgiving. Only it is consciousness that feasts on itself in its myriad of forms.

He was right about much. About unconscious immersion in materialism--either economic, historico-philosophical, scientific--forgetting our true digniity. At least he had the consistency to oppose abortion, capital punishment, unjust war, and euthanasia, instead of focusing on one or the other like the liberals and conservatives do. In that way, I believed him when he said he was pro-life.

He was partial about much else. Pro-life...what of the AIDS patients who needed condoms? What about the grinding poverty of The Third World, and allowing women not to have an unwanted pregnancy in the first place and not have to wrestle with abortion at all?

Women. The question of women is a profoundly interesting one. There are really two versions of feminism. One states that women and men are equal in everything--brain power, legal status, human dignity, etc. They are right. The other states that men and women are, in many ways, profoundly different: different ways of thinking, acting, setting values and agendas, etc. They are right as well. The Pope, curiously enough fits in, in a manner of speaking, with the radical (often postmodernist) feminists. He definitely thinks men and women are different, how different vocations, different talents, different roles. The Pope just thinks that for women it is as a mother or a nun. He was wrong about the first branch of feminism (modernists)--women deserve equal treatment before the law. He basically agreed to that. For women to truly have that in the modern world, to enter the noosphere, women must have choice over their reproductive biology.

What does it mean to be pro-life? What will it mean in relation to nanobots, biotechnology, and human-computer interface?

I loved him. I love him still. I hope he prays for us. I never agreed with everything he did or said. Or left unsaid, undone. He was not an ideologue. He was sincere. Even to embarrassing degrees at times. He was a beautiful soul no matter what. He loved greatly. He loved God, Christ, The Church, and the whole human family deeply.

He has left an indeliable print on my being. We are forever linked--beyond time, beyond the grave, beyond space, beyond separation itself. God gives us a peak into each others hearts.
Pax Christi, My Brother, Holy Father.