Pope condemns condoms,

[sybaritic]

is placed on bad client list.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7952829.stm

What do you think?

 

[naughtylady]

Completely unrealistic but expected.

Ronnie,
Naughtylady

 

[Possum Trot]

Hard to figure out how the pope sleeps at night after announcing this on his trip to HIV/Aids ravaged countries in Africa. It's a toss up between him and all the ayatollahs as to who makes the best case against organized religion.

 

[La Femme]

Lire une pareille nouvelle me donne sérieusement envie d'avoir recours à l'apostasie.

(Sorry for the French post in an English thread but I don't know how you say "apostasie" in English)

 

[Regular Guy]

Lire une pareille nouvelle me donne sérieusement envie d'avoir recours à l'apostasie.

(Sorry for the French post in an English thread but I don't know how you say "apostasie" in English)

Almost the same: apostate - to forsake one's own religion.

 

[La Femme]

Almost the same: apostate - to forsake one's own religion.

Ah!

Thank you.

 

[thymos67]

Pour avoir évaluer le travail de plusieurs organisations caritatives et des OMG. L'Église Catholique et la Saint Siège connaissent très bien la situation en Afrique. Certains pays, les organisations catholiques représentent près de 25% des associations s'occupant des malades.

L'enjeu pour le pape n'est pas juste la santé physique des individus, mais le bien être moral. C'est pourquoi que l'application d'une grille éthique occidentale, libérale et matérialiste a très peu de sens lorsque nous jugeons la citation du pape.

Pour mettre en contexte la position du pape, que peu de personnes ont peut être lu:

Notez ce que j'ai mis entre les étoiles:

"Question - Votre Sainteté, parmi les nombreux maux qui affligent l'Afrique, il y a également en particulier celui de la diffusion du sida. La position de l'Eglise catholique sur la façon de lutter contre celui-ci est souvent considérée comme n'étant pas réaliste et efficace. Affronterez-vous ce thème au cours du voyage ?

Benoît XVI - Je dirais le contraire : je pense que la réalité la plus efficace, la plus présente sur le front de la lutte contre le sida est précisément l'Eglise catholique, avec ses mouvements, avec ses différentes réalités. Je pense à la Communauté de Sant'Egidio qui accomplit tant, de manière visible et aussi invisible, pour la lutte contre le sida, aux Camilliens, à toutes les religieuses qui sont à la disposition des malades... Je dirais qu'on ne peut pas surmonter ce problème du sida **uniquement** avec des slogans publicitaires. Si on n'y met pas l'âme, si on n'aide pas les Africains, on ne peut pas résoudre ce fléau par la **simple** distribution de préservatifs : au contraire, le risque est d'augmenter le problème.

La solution ne peut se trouver que dans un double engagement : le premier, une humanisation de la sexualité, c'est-à-dire un renouveau spirituel et humain qui apporte avec soi une nouvelle manière de se comporter l'un avec l'autre, et le deuxième, une véritable amitié également et surtout pour les personnes qui souffrent, la disponibilité, même au prix de sacrifices, de renoncements personnels, à être proches de ceux qui souffrent. Tels sont les facteurs qui aident et qui conduisent à des progrès visibles. Je dirais donc cette double force de renouveler l'homme intérieurement, de donner une force spirituelle et humaine pour un juste comportement à l'égard de son propre corps et de celui de l'autre, et cette capacité de souffrir avec ceux qui souffrent, de rester présents dans les situations d'épreuve. Il me semble que c'est la juste réponse, et c'est ce que fait l'Eglise, offrant ainsi une contribution très grande et importante. Nous remercions tous ceux qui le font."

 

[Avery]

Lire une pareille nouvelle me donne sérieusement envie d'avoir recours à l'apostasie.

(Sorry for the French post in an English thread but I don't know how you say "apostasie" in English)

Almost the same: apostate - to forsake one's own religion.

Actually, the exact English translation of the French noun "apostasie" is apostasy. "Apostate" is an adjective or a noun.


apostasy   /əˈpɒstəsi/ [uh-pos-tuh-see]

–noun, plural -sies. a total desertion of or departure from one's religion, principles, party, cause, etc.


apostate   /əˈpɒsteɪt, -tɪt/ [uh-pos-teyt, -tit]

–noun 1. a person who forsakes his religion, cause, party, etc.

–adjective 2. of or characterized by apostasy.

 

[Merlot]

is placed on bad client list.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7952829.stm

What do you think?

Well,

This is a perfect example of principles that ignore reality. What else would he say. He has Church doctrine to promote and Africa has it's monumental problem to deal with. While the Catholic Church and many others have seen nobility in suffering maybe God will forgive Africans if they choose not to spread this plague and suffer so much for the sake of this principle or nobility.

So be it,

Merlot

 

[G1GBallday]

What a surprise, the Pope prefers to bareback his Alter Boys.

 

[Doc Holliday]

The Pope can just go and fu$& himself !!

 

[JustBob]

The problem is that the Church is more interested in the application of religious dogma than in the actual people affected. This has actually been a rough month for the Vatican who have been facing two "scandals". This one about the ill advised comment about condom use (condom = contraception = bad!) and in Brazil where the local Bishop excommunicated the mother and the doctors who performed an abortion on a 9 y/o girl (pregnant with twins) victim of rape because the likelyhood of both the girl and the babies surviving a birth was pretty slim.

The good news is that the Church's absolutist stance on contraception and abortion is now not only being challenged outside the Church but from within the Church itself.

Two cardinals in Europe this week separately spoke of a hypothetical situation in which use of a condom might be justified: when a woman must have sex with someone who is infected with HIV and therefore must protect herself.

And in Mexico City, a bishop said at a news conference Friday that condom use could be a "lesser evil" if employed to prevent AIDS. "If someone is incapable of controlling their instincts . . . then they should do whatever is necessary in order not to infect others," said Felipe Arizmendi, bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, in far southern Mexico.

The comments followed months of ferment in the church over how to approach AIDS prevention. Last year, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) published a paper urging a range of methods to fight AIDS.

"For many in Africa and Asia, sex is often the only commodity people have to exchange for food, school fees, exam results, employment or survival itself in situations of violence," the paper said. "Any strategy that enables a person to move from a higher-risk towards the lower end of the continuum, CAFOD believes, is a valid risk reduction strategy."

"But if we are dealing with someone or a situation in which clearly persons are going to act in harmful ways, say, a prostitute who is going to continue her activities, then one might say, 'Stop. But if you are not going to, at least do this,' " said Luno, who is an adviser to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican department charged with safeguarding orthodoxy.

One possible avenue for a new condom policy would be a "lesser-of-two-evils" approach. In this regard, condoms could be approved as a means of reducing the instance of danger or sin in cases where someone is bent on having extramarital sex or sex with a spouse while infected with HIV.

Rodriguez Luno -- without endorsing a new policy -- placed the issue in the context of the Ten Commandments. Sex outside of marriage already breaks the Sixth Commandment, which forbids adultery, he said. "Infecting someone with AIDS would also mean sinning against the Fifth Commandment -- you shall not kill," he said. "Condoms would diminish that danger."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29404-2005Jan22.html

 

[JustBob]

It's interesting to note that this "lesser of two evils" approach has also been mentionned in the case of abortion. And not by a nobody but by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, an ethicist who heads the Pontifical Academy of Life:

The church says it cannot decide to save the fetus over the pregnant woman any more that it can decide to save the pregnant woman over the fetus. However futile or preordained the outcome might be, one must follow a course of action that tries to save both.

While this has a certain philosophical elegance, it is a death sentence for the woman.

Fisichella understands and seems to accept this position. He reaffirms that abortion is an “intrinsically wicked act” but suggests that under certain circumstances it might be the lesser of two evils. He accepts that the girl's life was in danger and asks the important ethical question: how are we to act in such a case? It is, he says, “an arduous decision for the physician and for the moral law.” He goes on: “The conscience of the physician finds itself alone when forced to decide the best thing to do.” Is he suggesting that in spite of the church’s position that objectively abortion is always wrong, the individual has some latitude in deciding when it might be the lesser of two evils and a physician might subjectively in good conscience decide that abortion was morally justified in extreme cases? And, what I ask is an extreme case.

While in the Archbishop’s mind abortion rarely presents a life against life dilemma, the fact that he acknowledges any moral discretion for physicians is extremely important. In a Latin American context, where abortion is increasingly being decriminalized (Mexico City, Colombia in the last two years) physicians are carefully considering their options. In much of the developing world the situation faced by the young Brazilian child is not so rare. More than a half million women a year die in childbirth; some from botched abortions, but many because they could not get an abortion in high risk pregnancies. If doctors had some sense that some, high in the hierarchy, recognized that these situations are moral dilemmas in which conscience must decide what is right or wrong, they might decide that they can provide abortion services. And of course this is what Cardinal Cardoso Sobrinho (of Brazil) wants to prevent.

Now for the Catholic Church to depart from their absolutist stance and introduce the concept of moral dilemna into such hot issues as contraception and abortion is bound to produce outcry and heated debate from the ultra conservatives in the Church. But the fact is that Archbishop Fisichella has unlocked a door through which women, doctors and policy makers might be able to creep.

 

[Doc Holliday]

The Pope's a dick.

 

[lambchop]

Is any SP here ready to fuck the Pope without a condom?
I am never going to see that SP EVER.

 

[Merlot]

It's sad to see all these politically correct (and mentally deficient) "journalists" so shamefully distorting the Holy Father's words. He never declared that using a condom gives AIDS, as I heard on CKOI and Energy.

What do they expect from Benedictus XVI to recommend to millions of people who don't have access to clean water and eat once every two days to do? When they feel the need to bang the wife of their neighbour, go to the nearest Jean Coutu to buy a dozen of Trojans, register to Merb, and not forget posting a review with as many details as possible?

For God's sake, he's the Pope! not the organizer of a Gay pride or a Love parade!

It makes me seriously wonder who is the most inconcious and criminal in this story? The Catholics or the left-wing political lobbies?

There's none so deaf as those who don't want to hear.

Hello Corleone,

I agree that there are unfair distortions about the Pope, we we shouldn't be surprised if any Pope refuses to change their views against what they see as promoting fornication through condoms as you seem to infer. From my point of view the Pope is failing to deal with a necessity due to the realities of a great tragedy and is, in effect, sacrificing people for the supposed sanctity of church doctrine. I do not see why using condoms to save lives is a sin versus fears using them will promote sexual excess.

However, both your ethical connections to the Pope and identification of the cause of the problem in Africa are defective. You seem to support the Pope, but you have a very frivolous attitude about the commandment concerning adultery that is one the key tenets of Church doctrine the Papacy is supposed to be based on. Then you infer condom usage is a cause of homosexuality, while implying Gays are guilty for causing the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Your ethical connections are inconsistent at best, and your obvious homophobia has stunted your rationale. This kind of erroneous and conflicting argumentation only exacerbates the problem. The issue concerning Benedict XVI is Church views on the morality of using condoms versus their use as one of the practical solutions for all sexual partners to prevent the spread of AIDS. Your attempt to characterize this issue as a Right versus Left or Church versus Gays battle is primitive and just damn silly.

PeeeeeUUUU.

Merlot

 

[JustBob]

It's especially silly when you read the two articles I posted on the preceeding page and the objections from high ranking Church members which criticized the Church's absolutist position on abortion and contraception by introducing the concept of moral dilemna and "lesser of two evils".

It makes me seriously wonder who is the most inconcious and criminal in this story? The Catholics or the left-wing political lobbies?

You do realize that "The Catholics" isn't a monolithic block of ultra conservatives now do you? And that religious dogma isn't set in stone and that Vatican ethicists have been debating issues for centuries? Don't you consider that healthy?

In these two cases (condoms in africa, the abortion in Brazil), the Pope was wrong and the Brazilian Bishop was wrong. The first reaction from within the Vatican was support, then damage control (note that "The Holy Father's words" were distorted from the Vatican itself, they changed the original quote from "...make it (AIDS) worse" to "...risk of aggravating"), then some opposition which will surely lead to heated debate within the Church. Anyone with half a brain and/or not blinded by faith should welcome that.

 

[Merlot]

Jesus Christ, why should anyone give a shit what the pope says.

If you aren't Catholic, his words are irrelevant to you. If you are Catholic, nothing the Pope said is new. This has been the Catholic Church's position for decades. It reflects Catholic doctrine. If you don't like it - why do you stay in a church you oppose. You can leave the church - you won't be burned at the stake and you won't go to hell, purgatory or any other make believe place invented by the chuch.

If people simply stopped listening to the Pope, the Bishops and the priests, stopped going to church and most importantly, stopped donating money to the church, the pope and the church would disappear all on their own.

Hello JohnHenry,

In spite of the brutal history behind so many popes, bishops, priests and all of the rest of so much of the Catholic Church, which I am extremely well aware of having taken a number of very high level college classes on the subject, the Church has been just as positive too. So everyone needs to stop acting like Catholicism equals evil itself. I may be a lapsed Catholic, but that doesn't mean I or any else should just play totally ignorant. There are over 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, the largest of the Christian religions by far, and though so much about the religion may be disagreeable it does a tremendous good in the world. And, as for all the Protestant religions, their attempt at reform is a total failure. Their churches eventually adopted all the flaws of the Catholic Church with few improvements...if much worth note. Or haven't you noticed all the money-grubbing, sexually perverts, closet homosexual hypocrites, child-abusers, and adulterous leaders in their ranks. Not to mention endless executions like witch burnings, beheadings for heresy and many other so-called "crimes", and the attempted slaughter of whole races. At least I have never known the Catholic clergy to fake miraculous cures on television for money. Moral perfection doesn't exist, and the closest examples like the Quakers get few followers. Such is the "pure Christian nature" of people.

And don't forget munchkins, both Lech Walesa (Solidarity leader) and Mikhail Gorbachev credited the fall of Communism to John Paul II...said Gorbachev: "the collapse of the Iron Curtain would have been impossible without John Paul II." Not every pope was a stinking Borgia.

The truth of the matter is that the greatest abuse of children in the US is done by teachers and not clergy.
PK

Hello Poker King,

Thanks for the support generally in your post, but the most frequent abusers or molesters of children are probably some sort of family relation or friend of, tragically.

really,

Merlot

 

[Poker King]

Hello JohnHenry,

In spite of the brutal history behind so many popes, bishops, priests and all of the rest of so much of the Catholic Church, which I am extremely well aware of haven take a number of very high level college classes on the subject, the Church has been just as positive too. So everyone needs to stop acting like Catholicism equals evil itself. I may be a lapsed Catholic, but that doesn't mean I or any else should just play totally ignorant. There are over 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, the largest of the Christian religions by far, and though so much about the religion may be disagreeable it does a tremendous good in the world. And, as for all the Protestant religions, their attempt at reform is a total failure. Their churches eventually adopted all the flaws of the Catholic Church with few improvements...if much worth note. Or haven't you noticed all the money-grubbing, sexually perverse, homosexuals, child-abusing, and adulterous leaders in their ranks. Not to mention endless executions like witch burnings, beheadings for heresy and many other so-called "crimes", and the attempted slaughter of whole races. At least I have never known the Catholic clergy to fake miraculous cures on television for money. Moral perfection doesn't exist, and the closest examples like the Quakers get few followers. Such is the "pure Christian nature" of people.

really,

Merlot

I agree 110% to what you are saying here. If people bothered to look at the actual stats they would find that in the US child abuse is at epic proportions. The fact that the US Catholic Church is caught up in this is not surprising when you consider the demographics. The truth is that the Church puts itself up to such a high standard they are the first to be criticized. The truth of the matter is that the greatest abuse of children in the US is done by teachers and not clergy.

The second point you raise is very good since most Protestant Christian religions have wandered very far from their roots where they protested the Catholic Churches demands for for money in the middle ages. What the Earnest Angelis of the today do would make the Cardinals of the Church of the 1600's blush.


PK

 

[Techman]

What can you expect from a religion that expects it's clergy to be celibate? You obviously aren't going to attract the most normal of human beings.

The church, any church, like the government, has no business in anyone's bedroom. Besides...good sex is the closest thing to a true religious experience that most people will ever have.