But What Made Him Great?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Even the secular world against which he stood so defiantly recognized his greatness. But what was it that was so special about John Paul II, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church? What set him apart and above all the secular leaders of his time?

At 84, he was old, stooped, suffered from Parkinson’s and slurred his speech. He was decried by our media and cultural elites as a moral reactionary who had failed to bring his church into the 21st century.

Yet, even as the editorial writers fulminated and the dissident clergy fumed, the Holy Father drew the young in the tens of millions. The great politicians of his time came and went, most of them long forgotten, save Ronald Reagan, who was very much like this pope in his humor, serenity and core convictions. And yet, this pope endured into his ninth decade as the most revered and beloved figure on earth. The world’s reaction to his death testifies to it.

But wherein did his greatness lie?

What set John Paul II apart from the other leaders of his time was his goodness, his holiness, his sanctity, his moral courage in defending the truths of the church and his uncompromising refusal to alter moral truth to accommodate the spirit of an immoral age. His charisma, like that of Mother Teresa, came of the fact that he was a Man of God, not a man of this world. He became popular by testifying to the unpopular truths of Jesus Christ.

What those most disappointed with John Paul’s failure to conform church teaching to trendy views on contraception, abortion, stem cell research and homosexuality fail to understand is that it was because the pope defied the spirit of the age that he was great. He believed in moral absolutes in a world of moral relativism. He was a beacon of light in a darkening age, a beacon of truth in a moral wilderness.

He died in the 40th year following the close of Vatican II, the church council called by a predecessor, John XXIII. And by the time John Paul II died, all the fashionable and trendy clerics of that time, from Hans Kung to the “Are-You-Running-With-Me-Jesus?” clergy were gone and forgotten

“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Stalin cynically asked. But it was this Polish pope with no army who would inspire Solidarity to stand up to Stalin’s empire and help bring it down peacefully in 1989.

“We’re more popular than Jesus now!” John Lennon exclaimed back then. Where are the Beatles now? “Is God Dead?” Time famously asked in the 1960s. Now people ask, “Is AOLTimeWarner dead?”

But if John Paul II achieved greatness as a man, a leader, a pope, the same cannot be said of the church he led.

Here in America, there has been a dramatic contraction in the numbers of nuns, priests, churches and parish schools since Vatican II. The church in America has been horribly scarred by the ugliest scandal in its history, the abuse of thousands of altar boys and Catholic children by pedophile and homosexual priests, who crept into the seminaries and were not purged when their predations were discovered.

Moreover, there has been a widespread loss of faith and belief in traditional teachings. On birth control, divorce, sexual morality, abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia, millions of Catholics now embrace Hollywood values and the culture of death. Indeed, it was because John Paul II would not yield on any issue that the “Cafeteria Catholics” still cannot concede his greatness.

Today, we are told a new pope must reconcile Catholic teaching to the views of American Catholics. But the proposition is demonstrably absurd.

All the churches that have drunk the Kool-Aid of modernity are dying. Beginning with the Lambeth Conference in 1931, which approved of artificial contraception, the Episcopal Church acceded to the spirit of the age. Today, that church has women priests and homosexual bishops living with male lovers. Meanwhile, many of its most devout priests are defecting to the Rome of John Paul II, while its devoted faithful are splitting away.

While the mainstream Protestant churches shrink, the more orthodox and militant churches that make demands upon their flocks to live by Christian truths are attracting converts.

It was the philosophy of John Paul II that he would do all he could to defend and advance the truths Christ came to earth and died to teach the world. After that, it was up to the Holy Ghost. Now that God has called his good and faithful servant home after a long lifetime of labor, it is up to the Holy Ghost

NATIONAL CHAMPIONS!
CAROLINA 75 ILLINOIS 70

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Of course, there was no way it was going to be easy. North Carolina did it, though, and now it's time to stop asking Roy Williams that doggone question.

Sean May had 26 points and the Tar Heels didn't allow a basket over the final, excruciating 21?2 minutes Monday night to defeat Illinois 75-70, a win that finally gave Williams the national championship that was missing from his otherwise stellar 17-year career.

"I'm speechless," Williams said. "I usually talk my rear end off, but right now I'm speechless."

Freshman Marvin Williams had a tip-in with 1:26 left, Raymond Felton made three free throws down the stretch and the Tar Heels (33-4) won their first title since 1993, back when Dean Smith was coaching and Williams was at Kansas, in the middle of his Final Four futility.

"He is the greatest coach," Felton said. "If he retired tomorrow, I would vote for him for the Hall of Fame. He told us he would bring us a championship and we did it as a team."

Led by May's 10-for-11 shooting, Carolina took a 65-55 lead with 8:51 left and it looked like Williams would win his 41st tournament game and first championship going away. But Illinois (37-2) never quits.

But Illinois (37-2) never quits. The Illini trailed by 15 early in the second half and 10 a bit later. They tied the game twice in the last 51?2 minutes, but when they had a chance to force overtime, Luther Head missed a 3-pointer with 17 seconds left, ending their chance to set the NCAA record for wins in a season.

"Not much you can say," Illinois coach Bruce Weber said. "We had a tremendous year. It was just a special journey."

When it was over -- after Felton had made his last two free throws, after May had cradled his 10th and final rebound -- Williams took off his glasses and started looking for people to hug.

A few moments later, he was crying, much like he has at the end of every season -- though no ending has been as sweet as this one.

"I'm just so happy for myself, my family," Williams said. "These seniors ... what they've been through for four years. They took me for a heck of a ride."

Luther Head led Illinois with 21 points. He had a wide-open look at a 3-pointer that would have tied the game with 17 seconds left, but it bounded off and coach Bruce Weber's magical ride with the Illini wound up one win short of the real fairytale ending he hoped for.

His opponent, Williams, left Kansas to take over the Tar Heels two years ago, after the program Smith built had faltered and fallen to 8-20. Williams took a ton of heat for leaving Kansas after losing in the title game in 2003 -- his fourth close call at the Final Four.

He defended the move, saying coming back to his alma mater had always been his dream. Then, this week, he dealt with a more familiar question: Did he need to win a title to call his career a success?

He told the story of Smith insisting he was no better a coach after he finally won one in 1982, but Williams conceded that answering that "same doggone question" did get a little annoying at times.

He finally broke through in a terrific game, the first meeting of the top two teams in the final Associated Press poll since 1975, when UCLA defeated Kentucky.

"For coach to be able to say that the first team to get him a championship was the 2005 team is an honor," May said. "He'll win a few more before he's done."

After May made a short shot with 11:22 left in the first half for an 18-17 lead, Carolina never trailed again -- but this game never really got comfortable.

May was unstoppable for the first 12 minutes of the second half, scoring 16 points during that stretch and dishing out two assists to help North Carolina push its lead to as many as 15 and fight off a number of Illinois rallies.

James Augustine, charged with stopping the 6-foot-9 center, was in foul trouble through most of it. Weber put him back in to try toslow May down, but oddly, it was when Augustine drew his fifth foul, with 7 minutes left, that the Illini finally caught up.

That Illinois could hang in there was no surprise. This was the team that rallied from 15 down with 4 minutes left against Arizona in the regional to make it to its first Final Four since 1989.

But the Illini could never take a lead. And after Head hit a 3-pointer with 2:40 left, Deron Williams missed on an open look, Felton stepped in front of a bad pass by Head, then Head missed the potential game-tying shot at the end. In all, the Illini missed five 3-pointers down the stretch, part of a night in which they shot 12-for-40 from long range and just 38 percent overall.

Felton finished with 17 points and seven assists and Rashad McCants had 14 for the Tar Heels, all in the first half.

Deron Williams scored 17 and Brown had 12 for the Illini, but they needed a combined 39 shots to get there -- and, in the end, the 27-for-70 shooting night just couldn't be overcome.

The game turned in North Carolina's favor during a 13-2 run over the last 4:58 of the first half.

Felton, McCants and Jawad Williams each hit 3-pointers during the stretch. More significantly, though, was the way the Tar Heels dominated on defense.

Head squirmed open for a twisting shot from point blank on the baseline, but it missed. Roger Powell Jr. rebounded but couldn't get the ball to the rim -- rejected twice by North Carolina's inside players.

In the end, the Tar Heels won the matchup that was billed as Team vs. Talent -- the Tar Heels with the talent and the Illini with the team. It turned out Carolina really had both, although as this taut game showed, coaching a championship took much more than just rolling a ball onto the court.

"A lot of people said we were just talented, but not a team," May said. "But when times got tough, we banded together and came through. We showed we're not just talented. We're a team."

From washingtonpost.com:

A Celebrant of Freedom
By George F. Will

In Eastern Europe, where both world wars began, the end of the Cold War began on Oct. 16, 1978, with a puff of white smoke in Western Europe. It wafted over one of Europe's grandest public spaces, over Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's, over statues of the saints atop Bernini's curving colonnade that embraces visitors to Vatican City.

Ten years later, when the fuse that Polish workers had lit in a Gdansk shipyard ignited the explosion that leveled the Berlin Wall, it was clear that one of the most consequential people of the 20th century's second half was a Pole who lived in Rome, governing a city-state of 109 acres.

Science teaches that reality is strange -- solid objects are mostly space; the experience of time is a function of speed; gravity bends light. History, too, teaches strange truths: John Paul II occupied the world's oldest office, which traces its authority to history's most potent figure, a Palestinian who never traveled a hundred miles from his birthplace, who never wrote a book and who died at 33. And religion, once a legitimizer of political regimes, became in John Paul II's deft hands a delegitimizer of communism's ersatz religion.

In an amazingly fecund 27-month period, the cause of freedom was strengthened by the coming to high offices of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II, who, like the president, had been an actor and was gifted at the presentational dimension of his office. This peripatetic pope was seen by more people than anyone in history, and his most important trip came early. It was a visit to Poland that began on June 2, 1979.

In nine days a quarter of that nation's population saw him. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, but it did not have a sedative effect on the Poles. The pope's visit was the nation's epiphany, a thunderous realization that the nation was of one mind, mocking the futility of communism's 35-year attempt to conquer Poland's consciousness. Between 1795 and 1918, Poland had been erased from the map of Europe, partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia. This gave Poles an acute sense of the distinction between the state and the real nation.

Igor Stravinsky, speaking with a Russian's stoicism about Poland's sufferings, said that if you pitch your tent in the middle of New York's Fifth Avenue, you are going to be hit by a bus. The Poland where John Paul II grew to sturdy, athletic manhood was hit first by Nazism, then communism. Then, benignly, by John Paul II.

It was said that the fin de siecle Vienna of Freud and Wittgenstein was the little world in which the larger world had its rehearsals. In the late 1970s the Poland of John Paul II and Lech Walesa was like that. The 20th century's worst political invention was totalitarianism, a tenet of which is that the masses must not be allowed to mass: Totalitarianism is a mortar and pestle for grinding society into a dust of individuals. Small wonder, then, that Poland's ruler, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, visibly trembled in the presence of the priest who brought Poland to its feet in the face of tyranny by first bringing Poland to its knees in his presence.

John Paul II almost did not live to see this glorious consummation. In 1981 three of the world's largest figures -- Ronald Reagan, Anwar Sadat and John Paul II -- were shot. History would have taken an altered course if Sadat had not been the only one killed.

Our age celebrates the watery toleration preached by people for whom "judgmental" is an epithet denoting an intolerable moral confidence. John Paul II bristled with judgments, including this: The inevitability of progress is a myth, hence the certainty that mankind is wiser today than yesterday is chimeric.

Secular Europe is, however, wiser because of a man who worked at an altar. Europeans have been plied and belabored by various historicisms purporting to show that individuals are nullities governed by vast impersonal forces. Beginning in 1978, Europeans saw one man seize history by the lapels and shake it.

One of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown detective stories includes this passage: " 'I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor with gruff humor, 'and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy.' 'You'll never be a practical man till you do,' said Father Brown."

A poet made the same point: "A flame rescued from dry wood has no weight in its luminous flight yet lifts the heavy lid of night." The poet became John Paul II.