It Won't Get Far ...

... but I have to give it points for creativity.

Crimes Against Humanity Charges Against Pope Benedict

There's a copy of the entire submission in the link - it's interesting reading ... but I don't think it has a snowball's chance in hell of going anywhere.

You Have Got To Be Kidding

Since when has child abuse ever been considered "normal"???

In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered “normal” by society.

“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.

“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than' and a ‘worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”

... and this is coming from the organization that rails against GLBT people as "unnatural" and "objectively disordered", and condemns the use of condoms even when life threatening diseases are involved? I believe the correct term here is "hypocrisy".

Dear Pope Ratzinger: WTF?

How utterly, ideologically blinded can you possibly be?

Pope Benedict XVI says in a new book that condoms can be justified for male prostitutes seeking to stop HIV, a stunning turnaround for a church that has long opposed condoms and a pontiff who has blamed them for making the AIDS crisis worse.

Okay ... that's sort of a step in the right direction - at least the Pope seems to be acknowledging that condoms do have an effect on the spread of HIV. However, to limit the use of condoms to male prostitutes is stunningly short sighted.

Condoms have the same effect for women, but it would seem that under this Pope, women are not considered important enough to protect from STIs. Does this man think that women do not get infected by STIs? Or is it just that fertilizing an egg is so much more important than the risk of a life-shortening disease like HIV/AIDS? Has he not clued in yet that the vast majority of Catholics in developed countries ignore him entirely on the subject of birth control? Not to mention the moral vacuity of his insistence that women must always take the risk of not just pregnancy but also of STIs? (I would argue that it is an immoral act to demand that someone take such risks without their full knowledge and consent regarding the consequences)

The double standards and misogyny that are so clearly embedded in this Pope's theology are disappointing to see in this day and age.

Papal Misogyny is Alive And Well

Who is it that comes up with these things? In the same breath that the Catholic Church made the first steps to rehabilitate itself in light of the Pedophile Priest scandal, they turn around and do this.

The Vatican's reclassification of attempted female ordination was part of a revision of a 2001 decree, the main purpose of which was to tighten up the rules on sex abuse by priests in reaction to the scandals that have been sweeping through the church since January. The most important change is to extend the period during which a clergyman can be tried by a church court from 10 to 20 years, dating from the 18th birthday of his victim.

The new rules introduce speedier procedures for dealing with the most urgent and serious cases; allowed for lay people to form part of church tribunals that judge such cases; put abuse of the mentally disabled on a level with that of minors, and introduced a new crime of paedophile pornography.

Really? The idea that ordaining women is a "crime" on the same level as child molesting priests commit tells us a great deal about how far the Catholic Church has stepped backwards in time.

It seems to me that the current pope is doing a great job of showing the world just how desperately broken the Church is today. There's no way you will ever convince me that someone who has attempted to ordain a female priest has done something as damaging to the lives of others as a priest who molests young children. That the Church is so clueless as to announce these changes along with changes that are related to the pedophile priest situation is a sad, sad testament indeed.

That's A Start ...

It's probably as close to "Mea Culpa" as we'll ever hear Pope Benedict XVI utter.

Unfortunately for the Pope, it will take a lot more than a few words to convince the world that the Catholic Church has cleaned up its act where the issue of molesting priests are taken care of.

Vatican Dodge #2,532,792: You Took It Out Of Context

So, now the Vatican is trying to dodge the current Pope's direct involvement in hiding and enabling pedophile priests.

A spokesman said the claims, which stem from a letter signed by Benedict XVI when he was a senior Vatican official, had been taken out of context.

Well, let's go take a look at this letter, shall we?

Most Excellent Bishop

Having received your letter of September 13 of this year, regarding the matter of the removal from all priestly burdens pertaining to Rev Stephen Miller Kiesle in your diocese, it is my duty to share with you the following:

This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.

It is necessary for this Congregation to submit incidents of this sort to very careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time.

In the meantime your Excellency must not fail to provide the petitioner with as much paternal care as possible and in addition to explain to same the rationale of this court, which is accustomed to proceed keeping the common good especially before its eyes.

Let me take this occasion to convey sentiments of the highest regard always to you.

Your most Reverend Excellency

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

I see ... in effect, then Cardinal Ratzinger is saying that he will do NOTHING - mostly out of fear that the church will be "embarrassed"!

I cannot even begin to express my outrage over the Pope's obvious and direct involvement in this case.

AP said the Rev Kiesle was sentenced to three years of probation in 1978 for lewd conduct with two young boys in San Francisco. It said the Oakland diocese had recommended Kiesle's removal in 1981 but that that did not happen until 1987.

Cardinal Ratzinger took over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases, in 1981.

AP says the 1985 correspondence, written in Latin, shows Cardinal Ratzinger saying that Kiesle's removal would need careful review.

Cardinal Ratzinger urged "as much paternal care as possible" for Kiesle.

Kiesle was sentenced to six years in prison in 2004 after admitting molesting a young girl in 1995.

Kiesle is now 63 and is on the registered sex offenders list in California.

So ... the man had already been convicted in criminal courts of precisely the kind of conduct that the Church routinely condemns very publicly, and the Vatican doddles over taking any meaningful action for how many years? Good lord, but that's criminal in itself.

Yes, eventually, Cardinal Ratzinger's offices did defrock this priest - six full years after the diocese itself asked for this priest to be removed? That's supposed to be 'good enough'?

It's not. Moving so slowly when the accused has already been found criminally responsible is appalling - and speaks to an organization that has its priorities so profoundly misplaced that it really should give its head a shake. The leadership in Oakland had its priorities straight, and actually acted in the best interests of the church. This ball dropped in the Vatican.

And The Catholic Church Tries To Dodge Accountability

...Again...

The pope’s personal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, in a Friday sermon in St Peter’s Basilica, said attacks on the Catholic Church and the pope over a sexual abuse scandal were comparable to “collective violence” against Jews.

Yes, the mass extermination of Jews in Europe over imagined collective crimes is entirely analogous to demands the Catholic Church hierarchy be held accountable and liable for very real crimes and very real cover-ups of those crimes.

Today, we see the Church trying to backpedal from such an obvious blunder.

Talk about out of touch with reality.

That Would Be A Start

While the Vatican's official mouthpieces gnash their teeth and angrily deny anything that implies that Pope Benedict XVI ever had anything to do with covering up the tracks of pedophile priests, someone in the Vatican makes a comment that makes sense:

"We need a culture of alertness and bravery, to do the housework," Cardinal Kasper said.
"There is no turning back on the path we are now on and that is good."

If the Vatican actually undertakes such a housecleaning, it could be very fruitful indeed.

However, that said, we have to also recognize that the church has tried to place itself above the law in many countries - and in doing so has failed utterly to do justice to either the victims of its most perverse clergy, but has stained itself twice over by actively allowing the abusers to go on.

This time, while a house cleaning might be a good thing, I think that housecleaning has to be seen to be done in an open, transparent manner, possibly with the church itself taking criminal and civil responsibility not just for its actions, but those of its clergy who were protected by policies that enabled the abuse.

Unfortunately for the Pope and his defenders, the allegations that he directly or indirectly was involved are serious, and must be addressed. To do anything less would call into question any 'housecleaning' exercise that might be undertaken by the Vatican ... and since the Vatican is clearly a biased party, the entire case - all of it - should be turned over to the legal authorities that operate in the region of the diocese/archdiocese that Ratzinger was in charge of.

I doubt very much that the Vatican will be anywhere near as open about all this as is truly needed.

It's About Accountability and Responsibility

Ironically, in spite of the headline, I'm not going to be talking about Stephen Harper and his band of twits. This is about the seemingly endless sex abuse scandal that continues to rock the Roman Catholic Church ... and Michael Coren's utter misunderstanding of the situation.

It’s Saturday, so it must be time for yet another attack on the Roman Catholic Church — this time involving lies about the Pope, his brother and, before long, his auntie Freda and his pet cat Hans.

Logical thinking and balanced thought were eliminated from this subject long ago. It’s church-bashing time and why bother about poverty and war when you can pretend that Catholicism is to blame for everything.

Of course - the nitwit picks up on the role that the current Pope has apparently played in one diocese, and conveniently ignores the fact that what's coming out now shows us a picture of an organization that has actively and systemically enabled pedophiles in its midst.

Yet if we are to believe the media, abuse is almost exclusively Catholic and — here we go again — all because of celibacy and an all-male clergy.

Complete trash-talk of course. A failed priest says no more about Catholicism than a failed Canadian says about Canada.

Nice straw man argument there, Michael. Care to try again? I don't think people really care what vows a priest takes. While personally I find the notion of a celibate priesthood a bit ridiculous, that's really an internal matter as it has little or no effect on the parishoners whether the priest is married or not.

While sexual abuse is obviously grotesque, the number of occurrences in the Catholic Church is neither higher nor lower than any other denomination or religion and the same as those in education, sports and any other institution that involves a power dynamic between adults and youth.

Again, Coren completely misses the boat. In those other "institutions", the abuser and their enablers are subject to criminal prosecution, and rightly so. The issue here is that the Catholic Church has tried to not only set itself apart from the laws in so many lands, but has actively attempted to protect its clergy from prosecution - not just once, but repeatedly.

Worse, from an optics point of view, is that the current Pope's name appears repeatedly in this history - including renewing or re-approving the original protocol the church came up with to conceal child molesters in its midst.

People are looking for something here - it's called accountability. The rot in the clergy has been percolating to the top, and today the people who are implicated are very highly placed in the church hierarchy. These are people whose acts and actions attempted to protect the abusers, but coerced the abused into 'vows of silence' and generally tried to place the clergy outside the laws of the land.

If a hockey coach abuses his players, he goes to trial. If his leadership moves him around to conceal his tracks, they too are culpable for their acts. Why should a member of the clergy be any different simply because they are part of the Catholic Church?

Yet More Child Molesting Clergy

In the last few days, it has become very apparent that the phenomenon of Roman Catholic clergy molesting children was not just an oddity that took place in a few North American parishes.

I see now that the Pope is saying "sorry" to his flock in Ireland with a Pastoral Letter.

This has been bubbling about for close to twenty years in North America, and the incidents that are being described go back as far as the 1950s. Entire generations of the faithful have been lied to and deceived by the church hierarchy which is known to have actively covered up the tracks of its pedophiles and protected them from the legal prosecution that would have befallen them had the law caught up to them.

At this point, anything like an investigation that originates in the Vatican will have no credibility whatsoever. It is already clear that the Vatican hierarchy has moved in the past to protect its own from the consequences of their actions, after so many decades, one can only imagine the degree of organizational rot that must pervade the entire structure. Coverups, deceit and lies all in the name of protecting the "reputation" of the Church are guaranteed to be corrosive to the organization itself.

Instead, If the Pope truly wants to make a clean break of things, and re-establish his Church's moral authority, he should open the doors of the Vatican's archives (all of them!), as well as those of every diocese of the church to a public, legal investigation by a third party such as Scotland Yard or Interpol.

The goal of such an investigation? To describe the activities not only of the Church's pedophiles, but also the actions of the church hierarchy with respect to those abuses. Further, the perpetrators must be brought to account for their actions - in both the courts of secular law and the Church itself. The results of that investigation must be fully public, and the consequences for those identified must also be public - anything less would smack of further coverup and protectionism. This may be a massive bloodletting within the Vatican hierarchy, potentially going all the way to the top, but it must happen in order for the Catholic Church to reclaim any sense of moral validity in the years to come.

At this point, the reputation of the Church is so besmirched with the taint of sexual abuse and coverup that it is hard to take any of its moral teachings seriously. To rail against civil rights for GLBT people whose actions are about living in society in peace with those whom they love when your entire organization seems to have become the world's largest pedophile ring seems more than just a little hypocritical.

That Is No Apology

There is an enormous difference between expressing sympathy for the plight that someone else has experienced, and the kind of apology that acknowledges the role that one (or ones organization) had in that situation.

Vatican Press Release:

...the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity. His Holiness emphasized that acts of abuse cannot be tolerated in society. He prayed that all those affected would experience healing, and he encouraged First Nations Peoples to continue to move forward with renewed hope.

"Sorrow" is not the same thing as accepting responsibility and taking ownership of what happened. But then, coming from this Pope, I don't suppose I have any right to be surprised - he seems to have a knack for picking the wrong thing to do.

Residential schools are a particularly shameful chapter in Canada's past, and most of the parties who played a role in it have formally apologized - except for the Vatican. It is disappointing indeed to see the Pope failing to take any kind of ownership over the role of the Roman Catholic Church in that era.

The Pope, Condoms and Next Generation Media

Apparently the Vatican has its feelings all hurt by the coverage of the Pope's anti-condom remarks on a recent trip to Africa.

It said the remarks had been "used by some groups with a clear intent to intimidate, as if to dissuade the Pope from expressing himself on certain themes of obvious moral relevance and from teaching the Church's doctrine."

Apparently, the Pope thinks that condemning people to a slow death as a result of ignorance is "moral".

It's time that this pope realize that in the era of the Internet, news travels fast, and the daft ramblings of an old man in a cassock will be picked up on even faster - especially when they are so obviously rooted in dogma rather than the reality on the ground.

H/T: Canadian Cynic

Why The Pope Is DEAD WRONG About Condoms

It's not like Pope Ratzinger hasn't been swatted around already for his statements about condom use in Africa, but then again, today I spotted a story on BBC's website that puts the whole tragedy into into human terms.

Zenthu lives in a shack where she sleeps in the same room as her father and adult older brothers. She says that they are often drunk and sometimes there is no food for the family in the evenings.

The moment I ask her about her mother she bursts into tears, sobbing and sobbing.
...
Her mother gave birth to her baby sister two years ago, but months later still looked pregnant.
...
Despite the presence of other adults in the household, the care for both the new baby and her dying mother fell to Zenthu, then just 12 years old.

She began skipping school to tend to her mother.

Eventually, in Zenthu's words her mother "succumbed to the excruciating pains".

She had died from HIV/Aids. One in three pregnant mothers in some townships has the virus - so everyone must surely know someone with HIV. But the stigma means it is not discussed.

Imagine being twelve, and being the primary caregiver to the person who brought you into this world. Watching her wither away and die day by day - slowly and painfully.

Why? Because she had sex with someone who was HIV+...whether or not they knew it.

What's worse, is that the tragedy repeats itself with the next generation:

Or perhaps once they have been orphaned they are more likely to develop relationships with older men who can give them clothes and mobile phone time, but whose age makes them more likely to have HIV.

Or that without their parents' protection they might be more vulnerable to rape, a crime so common that some mothers living in the townships take their daughters to have long-lasting contraceptive injections at the age of 12 or 13, not because they think they're going to choose to have sex, but because the likelihood they'll be raped is so high.

Think about these things a bit. The dogmatic insistence of the Pope on "abstinence" is rooted in some fantasy world where everybody follows the same rules. Out in the real world, it's a much harsher, grittier picture. Condoms are a necessary part of the fight against HIV/AIDS, just like realistic sex education is. Sticking your head in the sand isn't going to do it.

Unfortunately, people in Africa are dying, and because old men in cassocks don't want to face the reality of that situation, simple things that could be done are being suppressed. This isn't just wrong, it's a moral failing far beyond that which they are so quick to criticize others for.

Shorter Vatican: The Guy At The Top Is Clueless

Apparently a few people in the Vatican are starting to awaken to the reality that the current Pope is somewhat less than beneficial to the Catholic Church's image.

Another Vatican insider described Pope Benedict's four-year-old papacy as "a disaster", recalling the pontiff's previous inflammatory remarks on Islam and homosexuality.

"He's out of touch with the real world," the Italian insider said. "On the condom issue, for example, there are priests and bishops in Africa who accept that condoms are a key part of the fight against Aids, and yet the pope adheres to this very conservative line that they encourage promiscuity. The Vatican is far removed from the reality on the ground."

No kidding. The rest of us who live with reality on a daily basis figured that out ages ago. Before Benedict ascended to the papacy, really, but we also recognize that the Church has backslid an enormous distance since Pope Benedict took over.

The pope's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, also wears two other hats – he is also the head of Vatican radio and of its television service. Observers question whether he can effectively handle such an onerous workload.

"He's got too many jobs. There's talk that he is going to go," said a third Vatican source. "You have people around the pope who seem to be out of their depth. There needs to be a major re-think of the operation, not the structure necessarily but the people."

The Vatican's press office works to a timetable from a gentler era, closing each day at 3pm, and familiarity with the internet appears barely to have penetrated the Vatican's cloistered confines.

No kidding. This is a pope whose fossilized thinking is still aware (and barely) of the wire services, much less the speed with which stories get around on the Internet.

"I think there's a good story to be told about this pope but it just doesn't get out because of the colossal ineptitude of the Vatican in terms of communications," said John Allen, a veteran Vatican analyst with National Catholic Reporter who is travelling with the pope in Africa.

It's hard to imagine what that 'good story' might be, when the pope consistently opens his mouth and demonstrates to the world how amazingly out of touch with reality he is.

This is a pope who might be a good man, but he is not a man of the times by any stretch of the imagination ... and he repeatedly demonstrates it.

Shorter Pope: Dogma Always Trumps Reality

The current leadership in the Vatican just doesn't have a clue about reality. Every time we turn around one of these idiots opens their mouth and says something that is beyond patently stupid.

Today, it's the Pope's turn:

Before arriving in Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, the Pope said HIV/Aids was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem".

The solution lies in a "spiritual and human awakening" and "friendship for those who suffer", the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

While in Africa, the pontiff is expected to talk to young people about the Aids epidemic and explain to them why the Catholic Church recommends sexual abstinence as the best way to prevent the spread of the disease.

He gave a similar message to African bishops who visited the Vatican in 2005, when he told them that abstinence and fidelity, not condoms, were the means to tackle the epidemic.

Hmmm...let's think about this from a perspective grounded firmly in reality, shall we?

First of all, condoms are one of the few means known to prevent, or at the very least, minimize, the chances of HIV transmission. The Pope's addlepated logic that distributing condoms can make the problem worse is completely false. As the GLBT community in North America demonstrated during the 1980s and 1990s, condom use can and does reduce the rate of transmission from sexual contact.

I won't even begin to describe my revulsion with the dogma of "noble suffering". This is nothing more than a way to wash one's hands of a topic that is uncomfortable or unsettling. Instead of taking action, it becomes far too easy to simply blame the person suffering from HIV/AIDS and call their suffering "consequences" and "God's will". Intellectually speaking, this is sloppy reasoning.

Lastly, while the concept of abstinence works in theory, it completely ignores the very real and human reality that people have sex. Just as the unreasoning "abstinence only" policies of Bush II failed miserably (with evangelical teens having sex just as often - and ending up pregnant more often - as their peers.

Condoms are not a solution in and of themselves. This is true enough. However, the rabid anti-condom stance of the Pope is rooted not in reason but in dogma ... and like the dogma of the church around abortion, it is completely divorced from reality.

Good Message To Send ...

So, I see that the Pope has decided to rescind the excommunication of four bishops.

The bishops are members of the St. Pius X Society, which was founded in 1970 by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in opposition to Vatican II reforms. They were excommunicated by Pope John Paul II in 1988 after Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated them in unsanctioned ceremonies.

One of these four is a holocaust denier:

Bishop Richard Williamson recently told Swedish TV: "I believe there were no gas chambers. I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers."

Brilliant tactics, there Pope. What's the message you're sending out to the world? If you are GLBT or a feminist, it's a really, really awful thing for the world. But someone who denies the mass slaughter of six million of the world's population in WWII? Not such a bad dude, apparently. But, this is the same loon who thinks that 9/11 is part of some larger conspiracy, and that women shouldn't be educated - so I don't think we're talking about the most broad minded of humanity somehow.

It's not like the world as a whole knows, or really cares, about some doctrinal squabbling within the Catholic faith. What they will see - I guarantee it - will be a hardline, conservative Pope cuddling up with what amounts to a neo-nazi in a cassock.

Good thinking! Just the image the Church needs to project right now.

Was I Really MisInterpreting The Pope?

Remember The Pope's tirade to the Curia that I accused of being blatantly anti-GLBT? There are those in the blogosphere who claim that people who read the Pope's message did so "wrongly" or that we overreacted.

Well, I'm not convinced. In fact it would seem that some theologians have more or less the same interpretation:

While the pope never mentioned “homosexuality,” it was his explanation of the nature of man and the order of the natural world that caused gays to react so harshly, Fr. George William Rutler, a leading Catholic theologian, told CNSNews.com.
...
The pope was saying that man is made in the image of God and is therefore “unique” among all species and has authority over nature, Fr. Rutler told CNSNews.com, adding that realities such as gender – man and woman – are not arbitrary developments in biology, or accidents, but are clearly defined in the natural world for a reason.

If a person rejects nature’s assigning of gender, or tries to change it, then that is disruptive to nature and destructive, said Rutler. The natural environment must be responsibly protected, as the pope mentioned in reference to rain forests, but so must the natural order in men and women, said Rutler.

Ah yes, the classic argument from the clergy - if you are gay or transsexual, it's all your choice and you are "rejecting" God's divine order. I guess that "God's plan" for the world didn't include the Intersexed, or those who are simply infertile for whatever reason either.

This is why homosexuals see the pope’s remarks as threatening, said Rutler. “The homosexual is a classic Gnostic,” he said, “because the homosexual does not understand how gender is intrinsic to God’s will for the human race. Male-ness and female-ness are not arbitrary categories.”

Oh yes, the Pope may well have been speaking in allegorical terms or just plain riddles, but his message was plenty clear enough. Using the "but you don't understand ..." argument doesn't cut it. It's not hard to understand the Church's position. When the line of reasoning being used essentially tells an entire population that they are for one reason or another "immoral", "evil" or "invalid" as people. The message is the same, and it doesn't take much to pick up on it, even when it is carefully concealed in riddles.

The second point is that the "Natural Law" that the RC Church works from does not account for a great deal of the evidence that is available today. (Unsurprising, since Aquinas has been dead for several centuries. Consequently, the understanding of GLBT people as surprisingly ordinary human beings isn't reflected in there. In the following article, a point is made clearly that appropriately raises the kind of problem that the Church's "Natural Law" interpretation faces:

Perito questions both the validity and the reasonability of such an interpretation of natural law. A more person-centered view of human sexuality is explored by Perito. Telling gays that God loved them into existence and treasures them as people and simultaneously telling them that it is wrong to act on their feelings to act and love sexually is inconsistent. To many it appears either that God made us as we are, with all that entails about our sexuality because God loves us, or God has done something rather strange, created natural impulses (for homosexuality is as natural in the animal world as it is notable in human society) in order to frustrate them at every turn.

Convincing gays never to act on their sexuality because an interpretation of natural law theory believes the only purpose of sexuality is procreative, is comparable to telling gays to go play in traffic or to find somewhere to die. There the inherent sexism of this interpretation of natural law is apparent, and it is also socially acceptable heterosexism.

While I view homosexuality as quite distinct from transsexuality, the fact that the leadership of the Catholic Church insists on lumping the two together by using the term gender as a synonym for sex, and thus sexuality, so chances are pretty good that what is said about the GLB applies equally to the T.

When Denial Goes Wrong ... Very Wrong

So, Pope Ratzinger has sent out one of his minions to "explain away" his latest homophobic/transphobic dog whistle remarks.

He also said that Pope Benedict's comments were "quite difficult to interpret" and as a result of this that he had been "very much" misrepresented in the media.

Horsefeathers - one only has to take other statements the Pope, and other members of the RC Clergy have made - to realize that the Pope wasn't being at all obscure.

The cardinal went on to say that the pope was only trying to emphasise the importance of the family, and the responsibility on humans to procreate.

Oh lovely - from this, one might conclude that rape is acceptable behaviour - after all the rapist is merely trying to procreate. Give me a break. (No, I don't believe the Pope meant any such thing, but this Church is so hell-bent on regulating sexuality that they've lost sight of reality)

We should also consider that sex does not necessarily result in pregnancy, so even if one were to view its purpose as primarily procreative, one still has to recognize that it serves other purposes. If it were purely procreative, then one would expect that the probability of conception as a result of sexual intercourse would be a lot higher. (Of course, nobody is supposed to question the Vatican's interpretation of "God's Design" ... goodness knows, we might have a point)

The Pope said behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations is "a destruction of God's work."

He also said man must be protected "from the destruction of himself" and urged respect for the "nature of the human being as man and woman."

I see. So, as I have repeatedly pointed out in the past, what about intersex individuals? Or are they supposed to be celibate as well? The other problem I have with this Pope's logic here (and the pathetic attempt at "unwinding the damage") is that it makes the horrendous mistake of assuming that sex == love. Anyone with any real experience in an adult relationship will have long ago realized that love is quite apart from any sexual relations involved.

"The Vatican has already reinforced its anti-gay reputation by strongly opposing a UN declaration calling for an end to discrimination against gays, but this latest Papal outburst is clear evidence of an obsession about homosexuality which is tantamount to paranoia."

Now then, given that this Pope has repeatedly shown himself to be overtly hostile towards GLBT people, is it any surprise that when he says something that can be interpreted as hostile, it is seen as such? (including by the wingnuts)

[Update 31/12/08]:
Apparently there are also theologians who see the Pope's rant as unreasonably hostile as well: The Pope has forgotten Christ's word.

H/T: AE Brain
[/Update]

Dear Pope Ratz:

[Update 29/12/08]
I see that the wingnuts heard the Pope's 'dog whistle' all too well:

Unless we "listen to the language of creation" he said, we end up with "destruction of the work of God." The Pope suggested that the gender ideology which seeks to redefine the sexes to allow for homosexuality, transgenderism and such things are examples of mankind separating himself "from creation and the Creator.

I believe this makes my point for me.
[/Update]
There are some subjects where it's painfully obvious that you have no idea what you are talking about.

In this case, the subject is transsexualism.

Without actually using the word, Benedict took a subtle swipe at those who might undergo sex-change operations or otherwise attempt to alter their God-given gender. Defend "the nature of man against its manipulation," Benedict told the priests, bishops and cardinals gathered Monday in the ornate Clementine hall. "The Church speaks of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order is respected." The Pope again denounced the contemporary idea that gender is a malleable definition. That path, he said, leads to a "self-emancipation of man from creation and the Creator.

So just what does the Pope think about people with various Intersex conditions - or has the Vatican given them some kind of a special dispensation? For that matter, the Pope has no idea whether or not transsexuality is a perfectly normal (if rare) aspect of human experience.

His selective condemnation is based on a highly debatable understanding of "natural law" - it is one that assumes that the inner person is defined by their outer appearance. As we all know, it is folly to 'judge a book by its cover', and for this Pope to condemn an entire class of people on the basis that "god-given gender" is fixed and immutable is deeply problematic. How does this Pope claim know what goes on inside the heads of someone who is transsexual? How does he know that a 'female soul' did not wind up in a male body (or vice versa)? The fact is that he doesn't.

For him to claim that 'God doesn't make mistakes' is ridiculous, for one only has to turn to the physically intersexed and realize that such a claim is ludicrous. For the Pope to claim that gender is "immutable" is to claim that it resides only in the genitalia, and yet we know that so much more of the human experience - social, sexual and romantic takes place between the ears - which other than what someone finds a way to express in words or actions is largely inscrutable. There is also a small, but growing body of evidence that suggests that there are physical as well as psychological factors at play with transsexuals.

In short, Pope Ratzinger knows not what he speaks of, and has proven to the world that he is truly a fool for opening his mouth. He would do far better for the world to focus his attentions on the horrors in Africa, rather than spouting off about identities that he is so clearly ignorant of.

Alright Pope ... Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

If Pope Benedict XVI really means what he says about Galileo, when is he going to start admitting that church dogma isn't always right?

He said an understanding of the laws of nature could stimulate appreciation of God's work.

Right...a few centuries too late for Galileo, but just maybe the church could turn its attention to recognizing the myriad diversity of the human race - especially in matters related to - oh I don't know - gender and sexual identity perhaps? An even easier start would be to do something trivial - like accepting that making condoms available in Africa isn't an entirely bad thing; and having catholic hospitals teaching people how to use the things properly isn't bad either.

... but then again, I don't think I'll be holding my breath on this one either.

[Update 22/12/08]
So much for reality intruding on the Vatican.
[/Update]