Paul Vitello, Carol Eisenberg and Letta Tayler, in Newsday (4-4-05):

The signs of the campaign were already abundant, one day after the pontiff's death.

Pope John Paul II, "The Great," banners and T-shirts read.

Even before the pope is buried, the quest is under way to make him not only a saint but also a "magnus," or great - a title bestowed by historians only twice in the papacy's 2,000-year history. The fledgling drive is stirring controversy in a Roman Catholic Church already divided over the late pope's orthodox views and what critics saw as his autocratic style.

Several prominent Roman Catholic intellectuals are waving the magnus banner. They include Vatican insider Vittorio Messori, who glowed over the prospect in a column published Saturday in the respected Italian daily Corriere della Sera - just hours before the pope's death - titled "Already a Saint."

"It is with...

Nicholas Thompson, in the Boston Glob (4-3-05):

IN THE SUMMER of 1943, George Kennan and Paul Nitze met on a train going from New York to Washington. Neither knew who the other was, nor was there any reason they should have. Kennan was a 39-year-old diplomat, just returned from Portugal. A Wall Street man four years Kennan's junior, Nitze was a second-level official at the Board of Economic Warfare. But Nitze found something compelling about Kennan and sat down across from the distinguished-looking gentleman in the dining car. The pair started talking and began a friendship that would last throughout the Cold War, a war that both men did much to define but about which they would almost never agree.

Kennan and Nitze didn't cross paths again until a few years later, when the two worked together at the State Department as Washington was remaking the postwar world. In the interim, Kennan had served in Moscow, making his reputation with his famous 1946 "...

Derek Scally, in the Irish Times (4-2-05):

Hitler is big box office. That's the likely message from the weekend box office receipts for Downfall, the German Hitler film that went on release yesterday.

More than five million Germans saw the film, well timed by its producer to capitalise on the coming 60th anniversary of the end of the second World War.

It comes at a time of an extraordinary glut of "Hitler news", an increasingly trivial fuel to feed the apparent growing interest in the dictator as the period retreats further into history. Leading German newspaper columnist Jens Jessen describes this latest wave as "the Third Reich, second-hand".

"We are witnessing a change. The last eye-witnesses are dying out, and historians and artists are now turning to the archives to present the era in whatever way they want," he says. "But what you miss as a result is the confusion of the time, the fact that things...

A steady feature in Pope John Paul II's obituaries has been mention of his unwaveringly conservative stances on issues such as abortion, birth control, gay rights, and the ordination of women. While these positions were sources of consternation for many American Catholics, they far from represent the whole of John Paul's ethical beliefs. Particularly in his teachings about the global economy, the Pope advanced a vision of social justice that challenges the current, narrow political debate about "moral values."

Many commentators have highlighted the Pope’s extensive travels throughout the world and his use of advanced telecommunications to spread his message. Less noted is the fact that John Paul's vision of globalization sharply countered the pro-corporate triumphalism spread by "free trade" boosters.

Reflecting on...

... In essence, the pope made two contributions to the defeat of totalitarian communism, a system in which the state claimed ownership of all or most physical property -- factories, farms, houses -- and also held a monopoly on intellectual life. No one was allowed to own a private business, in other words, and no one was allowed to express belief in any philosophy besides Marxism. The church, first in Poland and then elsewhere, broke these two monopolies, offering people a safe place to meet and intellectually offering them an alternative way of thinking about the world.

Here's how it worked: When I lived in Poland in the late 1980s, I was told that if I wanted to know what was going on, I'd have to go every week to a particular Warsaw church and pick up a copy of the city's weekly underground newspaper. Equally, if I wanted to see...

WHATEVER future generations may say about Pope John Paul II, who died on Saturday April 2nd, aged 84, they will look back with amazement on the moment when, for the first time in 500 years, a Christian bishop was in the vanguard of world history. That was in June 1979, barely nine months after the Polish prelate's surprise call to the Vatican, following the untimely death of Pope John Paul I. On a return visit to his homeland, the new pope was bathed in an outpouring of popular devotion that amazed almost everybody, from Warsaw's dissidents to an appalled Soviet Politburo. Millions of Poles turned out to sing, weep and pray with the man they knew as Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of the university town of Krakow. From then on, the Soviet communists began losing their grip on their East European vassals, and the end of the Iron Curtain was in sight. Stalin's...

[Keith Windschuttle is author of, among other books, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Macleay Press, 2002) and The White Australia Policy (Macleay Press, 2004).]

A university education in the humanities was once supposed to be a civilising experience. But just how antiquated are the traditional advocates of this ideal - such as Charles Badham, professor of classics at the University of Sydney from 1867 to 1884 - can be seen from two new developments at Badham's old institution.

The first is the university's invitation to Antonio Negri to speak at a conference from May 4 to 6 on Physiognomy of Origins: Multiplicities, Bodies and Radical Politics, hosted by the University of Sydney's Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and funded by its school of languages and culture.

And who's Negri? Well, he was one of the...

Thomas Cahill, in the NYT (4-5-05):

[Thomas Cahill is the author of"How the Irish Saved Civilization,""Pope John XXIII" and, most recently,"Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter."]

With the news media awash in encomiums to the indisputable greatness of Pope John Paul II, isn't it time to ask to which tradition he belonged? Partisans unfamiliar with Christian history may judge this a strange question. Why, they may answer, he belonged to the Catholic tradition, of course. But there is no single Catholic tradition; there are rather Catholic traditions, which range from the voluntary poverty of St. Francis of Assisi to the boundless greed of the Avignon popes, from the genial tolerance for diversity of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century to the egomaniacal self-importance of Pope Pius IX in the 19th century, from the secrecy and plotting of Opus Dei to the openness and humane service of the Community of Sant'Egidio. Over its 2,000-year history...

[Mr. Weigel is a senior fellow and director of the Catholic Studies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is author of "Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II," (HarperCollins, 1999) and "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God," just out from Basic Books.]

... In a 1968 letter to the French Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac, then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla suggested that "a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person" was at the root of the 20th century's grim record: two World Wars, Auschwitz and the Gulag, a Cold War threatening global disaster, oceans of blood and mountains of corpses. How had a century begun with such high hopes for the human future produced mankind's greatest catastrophes? Because, Karol Wojtyla proposed, Western...