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The man known in life as Karol Wojtyla and at the apex of his career as Pope John Paul II is soon to be in line for yet another pietistic name change. Our current pope, a longtime friend and political ally of the lately deceased pontiff, has urged that the clock be sped up on making his predecessor a saint. Let me be the first to suggest a saint-name: Saint Crony - patron of short-cutters and line-jumpers everywhere.

The desire to make the earthly realm comport more perfectly with the man-made ideology of capitalism couldn’t be further from the spirit of genuine conservatism. Wojtyla and Ratzinger have left behind the skepticism of modern all-embracing solutions that has liberated the Catholic Church for centuries the vagaries (and perfidies) of the marketplace of ideas. As a church that began the 20th century by demanded anti-modernism of its clerics with the Pascendi, the Catholic Church was upholding a tradition (albeit an imperfectly recognized one) that...

It seems a fitting tribute to the man who did more to bring this about that the centuries-old method of recognizing saints should be chucked to pad his resume. John Paul II’s promiscuous (10% of all) canonizations had grown to seem cynical and irrelevant. Trouble in the African church? Name a black saint. South America growing restless? Saint-up a couple of friars from the Southern Hemisphere. Would we really be shocked to learn that the Vatican had (in the parlance of political consultancy) ‘focused grouped’ likely candidates for sainthood?...