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• But the sexual abuse scandal that festered under his watch remains a stain on his legacy.
• John Paul and his top advisers failed to grasp the severity of the abuse problem until very late in his 26-year papacy, even though U.S. bishops had been petitioning the Holy See since the late-1980s for a faster way to defrock pedophile priests.
• The experience of John Paul in Poland under communist and Nazi rule, where innocent priests were often discredited by trumped-up accusations, is believed to have influenced his general defensiveness of the clergy. The exodus of clergy after the turbulent 1960s similarly made him want to hold onto the priests he still had.
• Pope Francis has inherited John Paul's most notorious failure on the sex abuse front -- the Legion of Christ order that John Paul and his top advisers held up as a model. Francis, who will canonize John Paul on Sunday, must decide whether to sign off on the Vatican's three-year reform project, imposed after the Legion admitted that its late founder sexually abused his seminarians and fathered three children.
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• NANJING, China (AP) -- Strolling through China's sprawling memorial to a 1937 massacre by Japanese troops, a 64-year-old retired teacher said the incident remains an open wound.
• "Japan is a country without credibility. They pretend to be friendly, but they can't be trusted," Qi Houjie said as a frigid wind swept the austere plaza of the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall.
• Across the waters, Japanese visiting a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that enshrines 14 convicted war criminals among 2.5 million war dead say they're tired of Chinese harping, underscoring a gradual hardening of attitudes toward their neighbor. China criticized Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday for having a "wrong attitude to history" after he sent a traditional offering to Yasukuni Shrine at the start of a 3-day spring festival.
• "Yasukuni Shrine is a damaging element to Japan's relations with its neighbors," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said. "It is a negative asset for Japan. If the Japanese leaders are willing to continue carrying this negative asset on their back, the negative asset will become increasingly heavier."
• Such statements don't sit well with Ayumi Shiraishi, a 28-year-old hotel employee

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