John Paul's Legacy: The Long View

When British Foreign Secretary George Canning put the Royal Navy on the side of President Monroe's doctrine, he underlined his grand strategy with a rhetorical flourish:

I have called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old.

Even Canning could not imagine that the New World would soon produce a colossus that a century later would rescue the Old World from the minions of Hitler and Stalin. Nonetheless, he nudged history along that path.

It will be decades before we see all the fruits of John Paul's outreach to Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For one thing, mighty oaks grow slowly from the seed. For another, our media centers are parochial and seem casually racist. They believe that what really matters is what Andy Sullivan and Hans Kung think. They dismiss the astounding growth of fervent traditionalist congregations as mere sideshows because the worshippers are brown and black. In New York everyone knows that History is still propelled by Europeans.