Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Practicing unsafe journalism on Catholic Church

The Pope says something to someone about condoms, and the secular media completely gets what he says wrong. I am shocked, so shocked. The press has completely bungled, time after time, the issue of whether Benedict has some personal culpability in the sex abuse problem involving some priests (he doesn't), and now they have reported that the Pope has changed the Church's position on condoms, getting it wrong again.

In fact, you can almost count on the press getting just about everything wrong when reporting on the Catholic Church. They seem congenitally incapable of getting it right.

Here's what the Pope said:
[T]he sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which , after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.
So the press sits there with an earhorn, saying, "Eh? What's that you say? Your for okay with condoms?"

Here is Cardinal Raymond Burke trying to talk some sense into the press:
I don’t see any change in the Church’s teaching. What he’s commenting on — in fact, he makes the statement very clearly that the Church does not regard the use of condoms as a real or a moral solution — but what he’s talking about in the point he makes about the male prostitute is about a certain conversion process taking place in an individual’s life. He’s simply making the comment that a person who is given to prostitution, at least considers using a condom to prevent giving the disease to another person — even though the effectiveness of this is very questionable — this could be a sign of someone who is having a certain moral awakening. But in no way does it mean that prostitution is morally acceptable, nor does it mean that the use of condoms is morally acceptable.
The silly idea that you're going to solve thing like the AIDS crisis through pushing condoms apparently isn't going to get any support from the Catholic Church.

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