Reply #4: I feel exactly the same way. There was hope 25 years ago but it

[Nothing Without Hope]

faded in the face of his stubborn refusal to face forward and deal in an open-minded way with major issues facing the church.

"...We saw a pope who squandered his moral authority on issues in which he has no privileged expertise. I did not expect to be writing now that this has been a failed and disappointing papacy....About 40 years ago, Pope John XXIII threw open the windows of the Catholic Church by convening the liberating Second Vatican Council. But beginning in 1978, John Paul II slammed the door on the council's progressive changes and locked the Catholic Church out of dealing with the issues of a turbulent new age."

Yes, that's precisely my view. If the next pope also has that degree of reactionary intransigence and doctrinal backwardness, it will go a long way to finally making the Catholic church obsolete, at least in the countries where people have a choice in their beliefs. JP2 did some good things, especially in trying to foster world peace and healing breaches with Jews and with Muslims, but over all, he wasted a generation and set back resolution of many issues. It's very fitting, for example, that his funeral service, for all its ceremony and rich display, had only a few token nuns and no acknowedged gays, for this is symptomatic of some of the fundamental wrongs to which he refused to open his mind and heart.