A message of hope from a teeming church in Kensington

We are living through, or so it is universally assumed, the last days of a great pope. John Paul II rescued the Catholic Church from the self-destructive course on which it was drifting into oblivion, and put it firmly back on its traditional verities. He is a man of long and painful experience, acquired in dealing with the twin evils of Nazism and communism; a wise, bold and strong man, but also a priest of deep and rational compassion, a pontiff for all seasons of turbulence and trial. The aim of his philosophy is to inculcate in us what he calls ‘a just use for freedom’, and his thoughts on this point are set out in a little book, just published.* It is characteristic of his humanity that, in a world clamouring thoughtlessly for more and more freedom, he asks, ‘Yes, but will you use it justly?’

Easy to believe that Christendom, the entity coterminous with the Europe of history, is slipping away too, and being replaced by the new ‘Europe’ of Brussels — secular, materialist, libertine rather than free, profligate and corrupt, cowardly and selfish, the continent of hollow men and sterile women.