Certain people might consider applying some journalistic or scientific objectivity to the question of where in Africa the condom use relentlessly promoted by Western nongovernmental organisations and compliant governments has ever arrested, never mind reversed, the rate of HIV infection.
There is nowhere.
However, such a reversal is under way in Uganda, where the government's message is the same as the Catholic Church's: "Change Your Behaviour".
Huge numbers of condoms have been distributed in Botswana, and the result has been for President Festus Mogae to declare, "Abstain or die".
Who, exactly, is incapable of fidelity within a monogamous marriage and abstinence outside such a marriage? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing-world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world?
I'm not sure how long this Pope will maintain the Church's teaching on the matter (he's confused about everything else, from divorce to adultery) and marginalises conservatives like Cardinal Burke, while promoting radical liberals like Walter Kasper.
ReplyDeleteBut the orthodox Church position on this is fully borne out by the research.
Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, said that research into the spread of AIDS actually supports the position of the Catholic Church and the pope.
“The Pope is correct … the best evidence we have supports the Pope’s comments,” Green told Fox News.
If you are "not sure", then you do not believe the Pope to be the Pope.
DeleteHe does not indulge the American Loony Right that John Paul and Benedict sometimes found it useful to keep onside, but that has always been the biggest schismatic tendency of the lot.
The opposition to this Pope is largely homosexual, and that of rather a dated, Rocky Horror Show kind. Wherever Cardinal Burke goes, that element turns up.
He seems to go where it congregates, as a matter of policy. By all accounts, he then gives it exactly what it wants, which is the full Liberace.
Burke is a drag queen, plain as day, and he tours the Catholic world's leading gay venues like a circus. You are also correct about the US "Loony Right", the likes of Rick Santorum and Paul Ryan who think their utterly un-Catholic opinions are the Faith but who are as far from it as any abortionist. JP2 and Benedict did state the truth but did not lay down the law to them, Francis is not that indulgent.
ReplyDeleteThey don't really matter anymore. Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Pacific, the Caribbean: those are the places that matter now. We have a Pope from Latin America who scarcely speaks English.
DeleteBut then, can Xi Jinping speak English? Can Vladimir Putin very much (although he is absolutely fluent in German)? Narendra Modi's right hand man, and probable successor, Amit Shah, is far from confident in it, to put it mildly. Angela Merkel is vastly more so in Russian.
Welcome to the world.
Burke pretends to have been well in with John Paul and Benedict but he is purely a retired administrator and they would barely have known him. His only doctorate is in Canon Law and he is not a theologian of any note if he has ever published a word of it. He is the mirror image of the liberals.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to both schismatic wings of the American Church.
Delete"They don't really matter anymore."
DeleteNot the way that they used to, no. Although they do both still have a certain picturesque awfulness to them.
Delete