The AP is all breathless about the Holy Father's statement that it might be justifiable for male protitutes to use condoms.
No real story. What the Church has always opposed and still opposes is contraception. Since there is no conception to to be "contra'd" when two men commit sodomy, there is no question of contraception involved.
UPDATE 11/26: Mea Culpa! My first sentence is wrong. My description of the Holy Father's statement as "that it might be justifiable for male protitutes to use condoms" is incorrect. For a much better analysis of what the Pope was saying, see what Fr. Fessio says here.
Posted by Gibbons J. Cooney
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For years, the oft repeated loud chanting, if not heckling, by countless members of the Church among the heirarchy and laity has been verbally expressed as against the use of condoms -- not simply against contraception. That clarification, that distinction, has been routinely bulldozed over.
Last I checked, "male prostitutes" can be heterosexual or homosexual. Surely the Holy Father knows that.
I've worked at a newspaper, so I shouldn't be surprised when I see the press totally abdicate its responsibility to report the facts, but this one is so beyond the pale it's driving me insane. The press is deliberately misreporting the content of the Pope's book, obviously in an attempt to make Catholics look bad. The Holy Father simply said that the use of condoms by male prostitutes to prevent AIDS shows the beginning of a moral consciousness concerning sexuality, an awareness that sexuality has a moral dimension and is not simply a "drug that people administer to themselves." He explicitly said that condom use was unacceptable. Explicitly. And yet the press has reported this as "Pope says condom use OK in some circumstances." It's a blatant lie, nothing less.
The church teaches that a lie requires an intent to deceive. It is uncharitable and absurd to assert an evil intent to the press, a broad group of persons with divergent views. I suspect many people sincerely believe the pope was signaling a divergence from some widely perceived notions about church teaching if not simply saying something that no pope has said before in such a way. And that apparently includes the vatican's secretary of state who has now said: "It is true however that we had not yet heard it with such clarity from the mouth of a pope".
The Pope's meaning was questioned because the Italian translation of the book used the feminine form of the word for prostitute, whereas the original German used the masculine.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said he had personally asked the Pope if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of the masculine over the feminine.
"He told me 'No'," Fr Lombardi said. "The problem is this... It's the first step of taking responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk of the life of another with whom you have a relationship."
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