Saturday, April 18, 2009

Attempts to Silence Holy Father

pope not intimidated
France, Germany, the United Nations' AIDS-fighting agency, and the British medical journal The Lancet called the pope's remark that condoms are not the answer to Africa's AIDS epidemic irresponsible and dangerous. The Belgian Parliament passed a resolution calling them "unacceptable" and demanded that Belgium's government officially protest. The Roman Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms as part of its overall teaching against contraception.

The Vatican deplored "the fact that a parliamentary assembly should have thought it appropriate to criticize the Holy Father on the basis of an isolated extract from an interview, separated from its context." A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said: "We are making it clear that the pope and the church won't be intimidated by these criticisms or by media campaigns and will continue to staunchly support Catholic positions on moral issues."

Some unidentified sources have found it surprising that celibates have a say in issues related to sex.

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4 comments:

  1. Though I don't support the Church's view on contraception, condoms "not being the answer" does not mean that they wouldn't help. I don't know what the intent of the statement was, but proliferation of condoms wouldn't solve the problem, it would minimize it.

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  2. Vatican's comment was unfortunate to say the least. Although it is true that Pope's words were picked up and quoted slightly out of context, he should have remembered people are fighting a disease there. And as you said, condoms would minimize it. Holy Father could have just told the merits of monogamy and how fight against AIDS would benefit from it, instead.

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  3. There are so many things that would have been better to say.Like stressing celibacy or monogamy. I understand the cathloic view on birth control, but this disease kills so many people! I believe the Holy Father used a very poor choice of words!

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  4. Apparently he forgot how wicked media can be, they only quoted the first half of the comment which, in my opinion, was completely unnecessary. As far as Catholic view of birth control is concerned, I can not say I sympathize with it, especially in areas where people are starving to death.

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