Catholic editor calls John Paul II ‘unbelievable misogynist’

Anchorage, Alaska, Sep 28, 2006 / 22:00 pm

Following the Pontiff’s death in 2005, the new editor of the diocesan newspaper for the Diocese of Anchorage, Alaska, called the late Pope John Paul II an “unbelievable misogynist.”

“John Paul II did not like women and spent the entirety of his 26 years as Pope working to put them in their ‘place’,” wrote Maia Nolan on her blog, according to a new report from LifeSiteNews.com.

Nolan began as editor of the Anchorage Catholic Anchor Sept. 8, succeeding founding editor John Roscoe. The comments have since been removed from the blog, but have been cached by the Google search engine and are making the rounds of the Internet.

At the time of John Paul’s death in April 2005, while the world was wrapped up in praying for and honoring the deceased Pope, Nolan wrote: “This pope, this benevolent, everyone’s-best-friend, Karol-from-Poland pope, was an unbelievable misogynist. News flash, kids: JP2 did not like women.”

“When it comes right down to it, all the globetrotting and rift-mending in the world doesn’t quite make up for the fact that Pope John Paul II obviously believed that, on a fundamental level, women are not as good as men: that we can’t hold the same offices or fulfill the same responsibilities, that we are unfit for service at the same level, and that we should generally be subservient in pretty much every way,” wrote Nolan, under the pseudonym “Myster”.

Nolan wrote that she hoped John Paul’s successor would be “a little more progressive, a little more pragmatic.”

“Of course, the College of Cardinals is packed with a bunch of old conservative guys who generally share the most recent pope’s reactionary approach to gender politics, so it would also be a foolish thing to think,” she wrote.

Mary Gore, assistant to Archbishop Roger Schwietz of Anchorage, told LifeSiteNews.com that Nolan made the comments when she was in college and editor of the campus newspaper.

Gore admitted the archdiocese had received complaints about Nolan’s comments but she was not sure what the archbishop was going to do.

“Bottom line is that it's an internal policy decision,” Gore was quoted as saying. “Right now, Archbishop Schwietz is sticking by his editor.”