I’m doing this as I’m running to and fro but want to say that I, as you can imagine, think “failure” would be a wrong final assessment when evaluating the Pope John Paul II record. This comes up in an InstaPundit highlighting of a bit of John Derbyshire today. There are huge problems, of course, in the Catholic Church in terms of the terrible scandals here, bad liturgies, and the like—this is not news. And those are part of the JPII record, without a doubt. Which is a reminder, of course, that the pope is human and the Vatican is run by men–again, not news. Some of this record speaks to why we need not pray (those who are so inclined) for a John Paul clone, as another piece on our site today argues. May the Holy Spirit bring us an orthodox administrator who will crack the whip—to houseclean, to nix bad administrators, to emphasize what needs to be emphasized (which would not, I would argue, mean “amending some of the most anti-modern aspects of Church teaching on sexual ethics or the role of women and a refocus on the simple and powerful message of the Gospels“).