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.

The Wisdom of Old Age

+AMDG+  

In his exuberance for the progress of scientific knowledge, Francis Bacon coined the paradox, antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi—“Antiquity is the youth of the world.”  By this he meant only the now commonplace view that human knowledge progresses.  What we commonly regard as ancient is so only according to a backward reckoning from the present.  By the forward reckoning of the world itself, however, the present age qualifies as the eldest of epochs.  Therefore, the views of the present—not those of the remote past—ought to enjoy the prestige and deference ascribed to hoary old age.  

At least on occasion, however, it seems that Bacon got his age typology backwards.  The most recently founded fields of study, for instance, often show a peculiar and youthful zeal for proving the obvious.