KINDER'S COMMENTARY: POPE JOHN PAUL II IS A VISION OF LIGHT AND HOPE

So, post-O.J., how's American culture doing? Most pundits answer: lousy. We live in a country whose most famous Catholic is a singer who stole the name of the mother of God (Madonna), and whose culture is symbolized, at the popular level, by her prancing around in her underwear, simulating masturbation and singing raunchy songs. Today as always, ironies abound. Among them: That, riding out of the Old World and into the New, standing out like a tenfold beacon in the night, is a vision of light and hope. I speak, of course, of the arrival on these shores of Pope John Paul II, surely the greatest man of our time.

Many don't like the light he shines. No matter the network, I have yet to hear a TV report on the pontiff's visit that didn't highlight the latest poll numbers on how many Catholics disagree with this or that papal teaching on this or that divisive "social issue." In this tendency to stress the ephemeral over the Permanent Things, the commentators reveal more about themselves than they do about the timeless magisterium -- the teaching -- of the Roman Catholic Church. These commentators --well, they just don't know quite how to take this pontiff. That's OK, though. Neither did East Germany's Honecker, Poland's Gen. Jarulzelski or Gorbachev of the old USSR. About this pope, though, one thing's for sure: John Paul isn't "into" focus groups.

Surely, it was providential: the simultaneous arrival on the world stage of this surpassingly great pope, with his throat-catching eloquence, together with the heroic age of conservative Anglo-American leadership. I speak of temporal political leaders Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. (In the throat-catching eloquence department, no slouches, they.) At Notre Dame University in the spring of 1981, his first year in office, Reagan spoke of communism as a "sad and bizarre tale" destined for "the ash heap of history, whose final chapter is even now being written." Few then thought him prophetic on this point.

I'll bet John Paul II believed. In the awful crucible of bloody violence and despair that the 20th century has been, no people have suffered more, or longer, than the Poles. Cynically carved up, their nation obliterated by allies Hitler and Stalin, ground for decades under iron boots first belonging to Nazis, then to communists, John Paul and his fellow Poles have known unimaginable suffering. Through all this he, and they, have endured.

Absent the media hype that attends a John Grisham or a Colin Powell, the pope's book is a smash bestseller, as well such a magnificent work might have been. And, having seen nazism and then communism, in the words of psalmist, "fade like the grass and wither like the green herb," the pontiff now turns his attention to the West.

As one bringing a cool drink of water to inhabitants of a desert culture dying of thirst, John Paul's words renew us. Herewith the conclusion of his speech to the United Nations this past week:

"We must not be afraid of the future. We must not be afraid of man. It is no accident that we are here. Each and every human person has been created in the `image and likeness' of the One who is the origin of all that is. We have within us the capacities for wisdom and virtue. With these gifts, and with the help of God's grace, we can build in the next century and the next millennium a civilization worthy of the human person, a true culture of freedom. We can and we must do so! And in doing so, we shall see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit."

It is said that, informed of a papal pronouncement on an issue of war, Joseph Stalin sneered "And the pope, how many division has he?"

Rather more than the bloodthirsty old dictator thought, I'd say.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.