Reply #10: Actually, Pope John XXIII did some good.

[intheflow]

Honetly, he was the human rights pope of all time. Here's some of his human rights writing. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_29061959_ad-petri_en.html

You'll have to wade through some Catholic lingo and dogma, but there is some really good stuff in there, such as, "All the evils which poison men and nations and trouble so many hearts have a single cause and a single source: ignorance of the truth—and at times even more than ignorance, a contempt for truth and a reckless rejection of it."

Then, too, Henry David Thoreau, an American Transcendentalist, gave us the essay on Civil Disobedience, which would go on to inspire Ghandi and MLK. And of course MLK was a minster himself.

There are more, but you're probably not really all that interested.