ON THE EVE of the funeral of one of history’s greatest popes, the American media is struggling to absorb the immensity of John Paul II’s pontificate. Around every turn is another story, another dramatic trip, another chapter from his prolific writings. The ingrained impulse among much our media elites, however, is always to diminish.

The new media has assured that these growls haven’t gone unanswered, and most viewers long ago learned to turn off Christiane Amanpour when she begins to prattle on. But there’s a second journalistic sin at work in the agenda-driven commentary about the Pope’s “failure” to modernize the Church on issues of celibacy, contraception, and the ordination of women. Simply put, most of the American media is simply ignorant of the Pope’s critics on the right. There is a valid case to be made that whatever disenchantment existed with John Paul II came more from those Catholics still unreconciled to Vatican II, and deeply distressed about John Paul II’s refusal to steer back into the pre-1960 Church.