If you're ignorant and happy to ignore reality, sure he is.
As the dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung told the Frankfurter Rundschau: "John Paul II is universally praised as someone who fought for peace and human rights. But his preaching to the outside world was in total contrast with the way he ran the church from inside, with an authoritarian pontificate which suppressed the rights of both women and theologians.... Wojtyla and Ratzinger are the people most responsible for the chronic sickness of today's Catholic Church."
Part of that sickness, of course, stems from the sexual abuse scandals that continue to be revealed in one country after another, and to flare anew. There is little doubt that John Paul II was obtuse and derelict in his handling of the crisis, perhaps because, as his defenders argue, sexual misconduct charges were so frequently fabricated against clerics by communist authorities in his native Poland. Still, difficult questions remain about his close association — and that of members of his household — to moneyed sexual predators like the now-disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ.
Equally troubling are continuing attempts to bring the church's theologians and more outspoken bishops to heel, an effort that began under John Paul II with the repression of Latin America's leading liberation theologians. Many Catholics worry about a Vatican that fires an Australian bishop for speaking in favor of ordaining women and married men, but declines to act against a Belgian prelate who unapologetically admits to molesting young boys. Many are troubled too by the U.S. Catholic bishops — all conservatives appointed by the last two popes — who attempt to force theologians to resume the old practice of submitting their work to the local prelate for approval before publication.
