PILLARS OF SAND

Must democracy rest on faith? (Sophie Arie, Christian Science Monitor, March 6th, 2005)

Just as democracy is celebrating its first victories over tyranny and fear in the Middle East, one of its greatest advocates in the 20th century, Pope John Paul II, has issued a stark warning that self-rule does not always work.

In a new book published last week, "Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums," the pope attacks Western democratic society for being so obsessed with freedom that it has lost its sense of good and evil.

In the "negative" society of the West, the pope writes, "the principle to which people aspire is to think and act as if God did not exist."

There are such "enormous economic forces" behind the Western antigospel campaign, which supports divorce, free love, abortion, and euthanasia, that the Pope wonders whether the Western way of life is in fact a "new totalitarianism cunningly disguised as democracy."

He noted that it was a democratic parliament in Germany that allowed the election of Hitler in the 1930s. "We have to question the legal regulations that have been decided in the parliaments of present-day democracies," he wrote.

The book is the pope's fifth semiautobiographical publication. His first one sold 20 million copies.

By backing the Solidarity movement in his own country of Poland, the pope beckoned Poles to choose European democracy - an action that secured his place in history as a key figure behind the downfall of the Soviet Union. Now, he warns that Central and Eastern European countries are at risk of "falling without criticism under the influence of the negative culture so widespread in the West."

Perhaps the greatest fear in the Muslim world is that when they open the package that was supposed to contain Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Paris Hilton and Jack Kevorkian will jump out.