prayers

I was raised catholic. I went to 12 years of catholic school (no I did not keep the uniform), performed all the sacraments, yada yada yada. Once I asked my parents why they believed they were alive, and their response to me was "to know god, to love god, and to serve god"; you might say I had quite some time to study the faith. This study eventually made me lose it, funny how things work that way.

So Pope John Paul II is near death. He has been somewhat ill for a while, but the past 24 hours the news media has been holding their collective finger over the enter button to download his obituary.

My question: Why so many prayers and tears? The reports keep coming in of the people going to droves in mass, of Italy being in a state of mourning. One of the main tenets of Catholicism or Christianity is that the good or the saved will go to heaven, which offhand I hear is pretty nice or something. Really, crying because he finally gets his reward is almost insulting!

So you have the pope, the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. He had to do a thing or two to get where he is. In doing so I have the general idea that he pretty much devoted his life to getting others to heaven - which tends to guarantee his entry by default. I believe he would be very low on the ladder of people who need the prayers. Even for his physical suffering. Yeah it is sad he has to suffer, but people are worse off than him every day.

I don't know why I'm so cynical, I can understand how people mourned Princess Di or JKF Jr, but the attention the Pope gets baffles me. Am I a product of my generation or what?