Last week the Pope resigned. Yes, it's been a while, and I'm only now writing about it, but it's not laziness. I'm commenting now because I'm really discussing the reaction to it. Yeah, that's it. It was one of those awkward news stories that was so big, every news service had to report on it, but so straightforward that it didn't give them anything to talk about. The whole story came down to, "Old, Ill Man Retires From Tough Job."
As for people's reactions, they came down to one of three possibilities: committed Catholics praised him for maintaining traditional values, atheists and liberal Christians saw him as just part of the decline of organized religion, and everyone else gave him glowing but extremely vague praise. I'd point that out to those predicting the imminent end of religion:
I'll find that easier to believe when people start saying what they
really feel about the Pope.
The outcome is that no one has really assessed his papacy. Instead, people looked for any reason they could find to give him a positive review, often resorting to complementing the man himself. He does seem like a pleasant person, but that’s not usually how we judge world leaders. Certainly George W. Bush would have seemed better judged by his personality rather than his decisions.
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