Quel surprise: Christopher Hitchens, the man who wrote "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice," wasn't a fan of Pope John Paul II. In his rambling invective on Slate, Hitchens meanders from Cardinal Law to Terri Schiavo to the Kennedys, Tariq Aziz, Henry Luce, Maureen Dowd, and, uh, Josef Stalin (Does anyone edit this guy?) His point—and he does have one, somewhere—is that the Pope was complacent in the Church's appalling sex-abuse scandal (or, "child-rape racket" as Hitch says). Beyond that, we're lost. Case in point:

But let nobody confuse [Ed.—because apparently someone out there is...] the undermining of a Stalinist bureaucracy in a majority Catholic nation with the insidious attempt to thwart or bend the law in a secular democracy.