The Pope's Decree To Bring More Death To DC

The fact that HIV infections in our nation's capital are at rates high than those in West Africa should be distasteful and horrifying to every American. D.C. has no representation in Congress and 535 members of the "Board of Supervisors" who like to meddle in things like their gun laws, but ignore the serious problems of poverty and education that lead to these tragic outcomes. It's a problem in the black community that nobody likes to talk about, and the rates rise in direct proportion to the neglect. The biggest weapon to combat this problem is awareness

And then we have the defenders of ignorance.

Pope Benedict XVI says the distribution of condoms is not the answer in the fight against AIDS.

Benedict insisted that the church is in the forefront of the battle against AIDS in Africa. He spoke Tuesday aboard the papal plane on his way to Africa, his first trip to the continent as pontiff.

Benedict said "you can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms." He said that "on the contrary it increases the problem."
The Vatican encourages sexual abstinence to fight the spread of disease.

Improper education is now a killer in at-risk communities, and the Vatican knows this. The Pope was referring to Africa but he might as well have been referring to Washington, DC. He spreads falsehoods and ignorance, and given his authority he becomes an accomplice to the pain, suffering and death. It's unconscionable.

Hoping For A Bank Shot

We're at the part in the Rick Warren controversy where some "good liberals" like E.J. Dionne come out of the woodwork to defend the mistaken decision because, I guess, Warren and his cadres might spontaneously alter their own deeply held beliefs, and then how awesome will everything be?

Liberals who see Warren as a garden-variety conservative evangelical defined primarily by his opposition to gay marriage accuse Obama of selling them out. Gays and lesbians enraged by Warren's strong opposition to gay marriage in last month's California referendum charge Obama with pandering to white evangelicals and fear the president-elect has gone out of his way to offend them in order to curry favor with straight conservatives.

But a more benign view on parts of the religious left casts Warren as the evangelical best positioned to lead moderately conservative white Protestants toward a greater engagement with the issues of poverty and social justice, and away from a relentless focus on abortion and gay marriage.

I mean, this is just a fantasy. I know that Dionne thinks Democrats can crack this Da Vinci Code and get evangelicals to focus on different issues than they historically have, and that may be true at the margins, but for the most part, religious white Protestants care about gay marriage and abortion because that's been the sum total of their political engagement for decades. To ask them to subsume that is to ask them to subsume their personal ideology, and in some respects their morality. I just think it's very naive to believe that will change. Yesterday the Pope called fighting homosexuality as consequential as protecting the rainforest. The E.J. Dionnes of the world would say that I should be thrilled that the Pope cares about the rainforest.

The major political issue that Warren has involved himself over the past half-decade is Prop. 8. That's just a fact. He spent no political capital on extending unemployment benefits or increasing the minimum wage. I appreciate the thought, expressed by Melissa Etheridge, that if gay people just talk to someone like Warren, they can open his eyes, but while I think that is true with the vast apolitical or low-information sections of the country, it's not likely to work with an evangelical leader or his flock.

I fall more along the lines of Katha Pollitt:

To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton -- or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it's hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain's case, it doesn't really return the favor.

Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters -- feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community -- by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead [...]

In a news conference Thursday, Obama defended the choice of Warren: "It is important for the country to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues." That's all very well, but excuse me if I don't feel all warm and fuzzy. Obama won thanks to the strenuous efforts of people who've spent the last eight years appalled by the Bush administration's wars and violations of human rights, its attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God.

I'm all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama's base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far.

Hear hear.

The Pope And The Abused

While I'm not inclined to have much of an opinion on Pope Benedict XVI, I have to say that his willingness to engage on the priest sex abuse case, and even meet with some of the abused, is pretty noble, and completely counter to the Church's history on this issue*. Even the revered John Paul II refused to meet with the victims.

At some level he had to do this while he was going about America pressing for a return to moral values, but according to those victims I've heard, they believe it was genuine and not just lip service. I trust they'll hold his feet to the fire on this.

And the Pope also apparently gave an awesome speech. I agree with Jimmy Kimmel's take on this - the President is slowly turning into Will Ferrell's impression of the President.

* - And Ratzinger's own history on the issue as well, he enforced the secret document that was allegedly used by the Catholic Church to evade prosecution for sex crimes.

Yeah, I've Got A Thing, But Maybe I Can Stop By For Dessert...

Man, you have to be some kind of abhorrent for the Pope who was in Hitler Youth to not want to be seen with you.

The White House has scheduled a dinner next week in honor of Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to the United States, but one guest will be conspicuously absent from the proceedings: the pope himself.

There are no competing events listed on the pope's schedule, and the White House was unable to explain Benedict's absence from the dinner [...]

It's unclear why the Pope won't be attending the dinner in his honor, but he is expected to touch on issues upon which he and President Bush disagree during the visit, especially the Iraq war.

During his visit to the United Nations a few days later, the Pope will address "the false notion that might makes right," according to a Vatican representative.

Some experts also predict the Pope would criticize the "culture of fear" in the United States. The Rev. David Hollenbach, director of Boston College's Center for Human Rights, said recently that this culture is seen as integral to the US involvement in Iraq.

"Fear can lead to angry responses," Hollenbach said, according to the Connecticut Post. "I think the pope's message is going to be 'Don't be afraid.' I think the overcoming of fear can take away the impulse for war."

I was a little hard on Ratzinger up at the top, actually; he hasn't been too bad as Pope. But it's pretty telling that he's staying away from the torturer-in-chief. And I have to think that the events of the past week might have something to do with it.

Head Unmooring From Body Alert

It's OK that the US won't allow hard emissions targets in this round of climate change talks, because the Pope has attacked the "climate change prophets of doom", appealing to the world to rely on science and not ideology.

I'm going to repeat that.

The Pope is calling on the world to rely on science, and not ideology.

Pardon me while I pick up my head from the ground.

Deliver Us From Evil

This sex scandal inside the Vatican that every chat show is yammering about (that's what the news has become, a series of chat shows) is nothing so much as redundant. This one is sensational, as there's actual videotape of the senior official propositioning the young man right inside his Vatican office, but it's no different than the spate of cases that has sadly turned the profession of pious priest into a punch line.

Television viewers saw the Vatican official sit alongside his guest and say: "You're very good-looking."

"Thank you," replied the younger man, before putting it to his host that he was about to commit a sin.

"I don't feel it is a sin," said the official. When the other man insisted that it was at odds with the teaching of the church, the Vatican official brought the conversation to an abrupt end.

When his guest bade farewell, saying "It's been a pleasure," the Vatican official replied: "Not for me, because you don't fancy me."

As it happens, I caught Amy Berg's fantastic documentary Deliver Us From Evil last week. While focusing on one particularly heinous perpetrator in the California diocese system named Oliver O'Grady, who molested as many as 50 children before being sent back to Ireland, where he now walks the streets as a free man without the local police even knowing about his prior crimes, the movie does detail the centuries-old struggle in the Catholic church with sex abuse cases, and the deep-seated corruption inside the system, which seeks to minimize these cases by ignoring the victims and making every attempt to shield the guilty from prosecution and publicity.

Indeed, sex abuse has been an issue in the Catholic Church for centuries. It can be argued that this stems from the practice of clerical celibacy, and the arrested state of sexual development which priests are subjected to by sublimating their physical desires from right around adolescence. Are you aware why the Roman Catholic church instituted the concept of celibacy, around the 4th century AD? For the first several hundred years, priests, bishops, and even popes were married men. Even today the practice of celibacy is not considered dogma or doctrine but a discipline, that could be changed by the Pope at any time. While many after-the-fact rationales were given for forcing celibacy on the laity, the real reason was simple: money.

When Paul dealt with qualifications for bishops, elders and deacons, his restriction was only that they be “the husband of one wife.” By the third century, bishops were being denied the right to a second marriage.

The problem for Christianity was it started to become financially prosperous.

The rich, the thoughtful ones who understood that their earthly goods were barriers to heaven, were delighted to hand over chunks of wealth to the priests and bishops as a down payment on easier transmission from one place to the next. (The soul’s equivalent, the wealthy presumed, of time-sharing a jet instead of having to stand in line at a purgatorial Southwest counter.)

Not only were priests and bishops becoming wealthier, they were becoming worldier. Many were married, others just had “open marriages” -- concubines. Worse than that -- in the church’s eyes -- the priests and bishops begetting sons regarded the endowments being made to the church as personal property. So the same rollicking clerics were setting themselves up as landed gentry and passing the fortunes along to their primogenitor sons and heirs.

In the 11th century, five popes in a row said: “Enough already.” Then came tough Gregory VII. He overreacted. He told married priests they couldn’t say Mass, and ordered the laity not to attend Masses said by married priests and naughty priests. The obvious happened. Members of the laity soon were complaining they had nowhere to go to Mass.

The edict was softened a bit to allow Mass-going. As usual, the women were blamed. Concubines were ordered scourged. Effectively though, the idea of priestly celibacy was in -- though not universally welcomed among the clerics themselves. And handing over church money to sons of priests and bishops was out.

They simply refit Catholic teaching to promote the idea that celibacy was always part of the system, changing history to fit the economic needs of the church. This was a power play, and denying the rampant scandal right at their feet is part of preserving that power. A rich and entrenched church was willing to break any law and subvert any investigation in order to maintain that lofty perch.

Indeed, there should be absolutely no surprise that this was happening under the nose of Pope Benedict XVI. The entire scandal in the United States did as well.

In May 2001, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later elected Pope Benedict XVI on the death of his predecessor, sent a letter to all Catholic Bishops declaring that the Church's investigations into claims of child sex abuse were subject to the pontifical secret and were not to be reported to law enforcement until investigations were completed, on pain of excommunication. The secrecy related only to the internal investigation, and the letter did not attempt to discourage victims from reporting abuse to the police.

It didn't attempt to discourage victims because it wasn't written to victims; it was an internal memo giving the bishops their marching orders. And over the years, those bishops denied any wrongdoing, shuttled molesters off from one parish to the next without informing the authorities, and basically tried to keep a lid on the scandals until they eventually exploded.

This is not good for Christianity as a whole; new studies have revealed that believers and non-believers have an increasingly negative view of the religion. This is because those at the highest levels have, through dishonesty and cover-up, betrayed the ideals of their faith. The church is a slow-moving organ that extends opposition to reform as far as possible. This has damaged their trust between them and their parishioners, and has left those of us on the outside shocked at the level of corruption.