Thanks for your intellectual honesty, Spiritus, that is good to see. You will go far with that kind of self-critical spirit and earnest desire for improvement!
You're right, I don't use Assisi much against JPII because a certain amount of ecuмenism was permitted by Pius XII and there's just too much grey area.
Let me put it another way -- those who want to use legalistic / Pharisiacal loopholes to deny the obvious can do so if they choose when it comes to JPII at Assisi ( for instance, that the woman putting a dot on his forehead was as harmless as a wahine at Honolulu airport putting a lea around someone, and that it doesn't mean worshipping a false god or that if it does he didn't know, and really I can see myself being polite and letting someone put a dot on my forehead as long as it's just some kind of local non-religious custom ). The impression given at Assisi with all the representatives of the false religions standing there and holding plants along with JPII certainly smacks of the New Age, but the problem is the same as it is with Novus Ordo art -- it's hard to judge heresy based on aesthetics, on something that just comes off as "wrong."
The ritual with the plants probably has some kind of occult meaning, but not being one of the initiates, that is hard to prove.
There was no communicatio in sacris going on because Assisi was a pan-religious festival, it didn't really take place in any real religious context. If JPII can be proven to have shown any sort of approval of these false religions, then we have a problem, but there are just so many ways around that since Pius XII opened the door to ecuмenism. Someone can just say "He was being polite in order to convert the others," like when you or I go to a Christmas dinner with our Protestant uncle or what-have-you. It's not as if, during the whole dinner, we are shaking our fists and saying "YOU'RE A HERETIC!!!"
So Assisi, believe it or not, can be defended ( minus the kissing of the Koran, if that was at Assisi ). But there are no such loopholes when it comes to the Joint Declaration on Justification, to the Blue Mosque incident with Ratzinger, to the errors of Vatican II, etc.