The Pope is right, and the Pope is still right: Benedict and condoms

I feel great sympathy for the secular media.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Other Catholic bloggers have criticized the media for its coverage of Pope Benedict’s recently released comments on AIDS and condoms (reproduced in their entirety below), but on this one, to be fair, journalists are in a bind.

They know the Pope didn’t change Church doctrine on contraception, nor—the wishful thinking of a few familiar “religion experts” aside—did he even edge closer to doing so.  But at the same time, what the Pope said was unexpected and significant.  Several of the articles I’ve read in the secular press have hinted at just how hard it is to do justice to the Pope’s comments in a headline.

And the press has good reason to be confused.  The reason coverage of the Holy Father’s words—such as his March 2009 comments on AIDS and condoms—is often so unbalanced is that what he is offering is not so much a political “stance” on an issue, but a complete—and, for many, completely foreign—vision of what human sexuality means.  His comments in Light of the World, like his March 2009 comments, are intended to invite people to give this vision a second look.

Of Condoms and Popes

+AMDG+

Amid all the excitement about the Pope’s “game-changer” regarding condoms, I thought I might do my humble best to clarify the situation.  I’ll offer a roughly analogous moral case, but one that does not involve condoms (since, for some reason, condoms seem to be much more effective at preventing thought than conception).  Though it’s true that my analogous case involves killing, a crime far weightier than contraception, the cases are structurally similar inasmuch as the Church reckons both deeds malum in se, that is, unjustifiable regardless of further intentions or extenuating circumstances.

Let’s suppose, for starters, that a pharmaceutical company develops and markets a “euthanasia” pill.  This pill is designed specifically to induce painless death during sleep.

Prophylactic Soda

+AMDG+

This comment may be a bit passé, but I’ve only just started to blog.  I have a backlog bottled-up ideas.  So here’s an observation about the law of unintended consequences—a law that prevails wherever deeply human problems are given a purely technical solution. For some years now studies have correlated diet soda with weight gain.  Though counter-intuitive, the claim has provoked little opposition.