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stunning personal pronouncement

condom&pope
After Condom Remarks, Vatican Confirms Shift
By RACHEL DONADIO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI clearly acknowledged on Tuesday that the need to prevent diseases like AIDS could outweigh the church’s long opposition to the use of condoms.

It was a significant and stunning personal pronouncement from the conservative pope after more than two decades of heated debate inside the Roman Catholic Church and condemnation by health workers who said the church’s ban on prophylactics was morally indefensible during the AIDS crisis.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s spokesman, said that for Benedict, the use of condoms by people infected with H.I.V. could be “the first step of responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk to the life of the person with whom there are relations.”

“Whether it’s a man or woman or a transsexual,” he added.

Though Benedict did not endorse the general use of condoms or change official church teaching — which still strongly opposes contraceptives — his words ricocheted around the globe, greeted with anger from some conservative Catholics and enthusiasm from clerics and health workers in Africa, where the AIDS problem is worst. The pope also considers the continent to be a major area of growth for the church.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/world/europe/24pope.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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Dear Benedict XVI, you've got the benediction from an old atheist on this one...

pope purposely chose a male prostitute ...

Lisa Sowle Cahill, a professor of theology at Boston College, said the pope’s new openness about condoms was significant even if it did not change church teaching.

“I see it as a shift in attention, so that the politics of AIDS is larger on the radar screen than the politics of contraception, and to me that is a needed and appropriate shift,” she said.

She added that the church had held firm against the use of condoms even to prevent AIDS because the birth-control issue took so much precedence politically.

Indeed, Dr. Haas, of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, could barely countenance Father Lombardi’s comments that broadened the debate to include women. “I don’t think it’s a clarification; it’s a muddying of the waters,” he said. “My opinion is that the pope purposely chose a male prostitute to avoid that particular debate.”

And if Benedict was in fact opening that debate? “I think the pope’s wrong,” Dr. Haas added.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/world/europe/24pope.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

embedded with the fairies...

 

From Gerard Henderson

 

Don't mock the frock - Benedict speaks from the heart

 

 

During his visit to Britain in September, Benedict was subjected to more low-level abuse. The author Richard Dawkins described the Pope as a "leering old villain in a frock", the philosopher A.C. Grayling compared him to "the head of a drug cartel" and the humanist Andrew Copson accused him of undermining human rights. Yet, as Bryan Appleyard reported in The Sunday Times, Geoffrey Robertson, QC, obtained a papal blessing in Rome a few months before joining the protests in London.

The evidence suggests the Pope is more considered than many of his critics. This is evident in Light of the World where the former theology professor acknowledges the church handles some issues poorly, concedes that "the Pope can have private opinions that are wrong" and accepts that "no one is forced to be a Christian". The Pope also apologises for the "filth" involved in the sexual abuse of young children by male priests and brothers.

The reader does not have to agree with the views of Benedict to be impressed by the fact he gave lengthy interviews in the absence of minders and that Light of the World was released without "talking points" memos being issued to bishops and priests.

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Gus: don't mock anyone but me... But what the pope is peddling — virtuous and enlightened — is still embedded with the fairies... And popes are learned spruikers. They know the brief by heart. They have made ten of thousands of sermons, based on the same preachings with adaptation to the changing real life... No teleprompter? no need for it even for an oldie who's been spruiking for yonks.