Lileks was Good, This is Better

Jonah Goldberg gets it exactly right. For example:

Some believe there is a radical left wing in the Catholic Church that seeks to unravel the teachings of John Paul II, but this is an exaggeration of the Western -- particularly, the American -- press. The notion that you could find any cardinal eager to change church policy on abortion, for example, is simply a fantasy concocted by liberal journalists. Excepting, maybe, the issue of distributing condoms in Africa, it's hard to think of a hot-button social issue that divides the church's leadership a fraction as much as American editorial pages seem to suggest.

If a committee made up of Andrew Sullivan, Gary Wills, Andrew Greeley, Paul Begala, and Nancy Pelosi were given the power to select a pope from the current College of Cardinals, we would still have a pope opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

The issues that truly divide the church have to do with questions of local autonomy, global economics, and the like. It takes the solipsism of American liberals to imagine that simply because America is divided over certain issues, the Vatican must be, too. And it takes the ignorance of the American media to think that a 'liberal' in America is a liberal in Rome, Buenos Aires or Lagos.