War & Peace Quote by Greg Walden

Walden’s line is less a eulogy than a carefully engineered bridge. By calling John Paul “an inspiration to generations of both Catholics and non-Catholics,” he widens the tent first, signaling that this praise isn’t sectarian and therefore shouldn’t trigger America’s reflexive church-state allergy. It’s a politician’s version of ecumenism: universalize the subject, then universalize the values.

The triad - “encouraging freedom, promoting peace and respecting all faiths” - is doing heavy lifting. “Freedom” nods to John Paul II’s Cold War legacy, especially his moral support for anti-communist movements in Eastern Europe; it also translates neatly into an American civic religion where liberty is the safe, bipartisan virtue. “Peace” cleanses that freedom rhetoric of triumphalism, softening any hawkish associations by recasting a geopolitical actor as a pastoral one. “Respecting all faiths” is the crucial insurance policy: it anticipates objections to celebrating a pope in pluralist public life and pre-emptively frames him as a patron of tolerance rather than a guardian of doctrine.

Subtext: Walden isn’t just praising a religious leader; he’s endorsing a model of authority that feels legitimate in secular democracies - strength without domination, conviction without exclusion. The phrasing is deliberately frictionless, skipping controversies (gender, sexuality, internal Church discipline) to present John Paul as a global moral brand. In the context of American political speech, that’s the point: memorialize a figure by extracting the parts of his legacy that can be safely shared, then letting that borrowed gravitas reflect back on the speaker.