Great surprise in today's OR. What happened? Cardinal Bertone regained his senses??? And/or probably someone felt: what better opportunity to bring up the screaming unfairness of the Nobel jurors never having recognized John Paul II's peacemaking in any way??? Or that, the way the Nobel ninnies went on about Obama, John Paul II never represented hope for the world????
I think, too, Mr. Vian must have excused himself from writing the commentary himself, if the assignment (whether it came from Bertone or from the Holy Father himself) was, as Ms. Scaraffia sets out to do, to debunk the prize assignment in a civil manner.
Obama's Nobel Prize:
A demanding award
by Lucetta Scaraffia
Translated from
the 10/11/09 issue of
The awarding of the Nobel peace prize to Barack Obama caught everyone by surprise, including the President of the United States himself.
In the last 90 years, in fact, the prize has never gone to a sitting US President - when Jimmy Carter won it in 2002, it was more than a decade after his term - since it is their fate, after all, to be caught up in world affairs, and therefore, having to make assorted decisions relating to world peace.
Precisely because of that, commentators have been almost unanimous in defining this Nobel assignment as a form of pressure on Obama to make pacifist choices in carrying out his mandate.
Because judging from the decisions he has taken so far, it would be difficult to call him an outright pacifist, since what he has done about the US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iran seems to be a difficult compromise between trying to keep the pacifist promises he made as a candidate and a more realistic policy of government, which some have, in fact, called a continuation of the policies of the supposedly 'warmongering' George W. Bush.
It is an ambivalent oscillating policy similar to that which this US president has towards the great bioethical issues, especially on abortion, which has inspired great controversy in the U.S. Catholic Church.
Obama would do well to remember that one of his predecessors in the Peace Prize was Mother Teresa of Calcutta who, in 1979, had the courage to point out, in her official acceptance of the Prize, that
the most terrible war, with the greatest number of fatalities, is the practice of abortion, which is legalized and facilitated by international organizations.
But in the face of the prospect of this award being able to influence the future of Obama's presidential conduct, one must also recall all the perplexity about the 'failure' of certain authoritative candidates for the prize.
For instance, John Paul II, who was first nominated in 1999 (when the prize went to the group Doctors without Borders), and was considered the heads-on favorite in 2003 after his condemnation of the multinational invasion of Iraq.
That year, many initiatives and the overwhelming opposition to the war around the world seemed to indicate the prize was his, that even professional bookies bet on it.
But the awards committee - named from members of the Norwegian Parliament, under the terms of Alfred Nobel's will - preferred instead to choose the Iranian jurist Shirin Ebadi.
Papa Wojtyla was apparently considered by the members of the jury too conservative in all other matters, and they claimed to fear that by giving a prize to the head of the Catholic Church, they would be seen to favor a specific religion at the expense of others.
[But they already gave the prize to the Dalai Lama, head of Tibetan Buddhism and symbolic head of Buddhists worldwide, as well as to Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa! Not to mention Mother Teresa herself.]
Concerns which they appear to have overcome in the case of Obama, a choice that is much more controversial than John Paul II could ever have been!
Thus, once again, the Nobel Peace Prize has aroused great perplexity and criticisms, since
the criteria for the award appear to be influenced by politically correct thinking.
But at the same time, as the Vatican Press Office director said in a statement, one must rejoice that the Nobel jury is recognizing Obama's desire for nuclear disarmament
[As if he were the first world leader ever to express this utopian wish! Back in the 1940s, philosopher Bertrand Russell won the prize for leading demosnstrations against nuclear armaments as early as the start of the Cold War. Not to mention the absurdity of Obama calling for worldwide disarmament while he cannot even stop Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear arms here and now!] and his personal preference for policies intended to appease everyone rather than affirm American strength in the world.
[Which is not always necessarily good for those concerned.]
I am surprised Scaraffia does not mention John Paul II's role in the collapse of Communism. The Nobel nincompoops' worst offense in this respect is to completely ignore Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II - recognized by most contemporary historians as the individuals who most contributed to the defeat of Communism - while, in an irrational act of perversion, they awarded the Peace Prize in 1990 to Mikhail Gorbachov for, in effect, allowing Communism to be defeated!
The late Pope deserved to share the Peace Prize after the Berlin Wall came down because that was a concrete and genuinely historic, single-opportnity achievement - unlike his objection to the Iraq war which, after all, failed to present it from happening.]
BTW, here is the exact quotation about abortion from Mother Teresa's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself.
And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion?
As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even his life to love us. So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love - that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.
By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion.
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
I bet the Nobel panjandrums must have wet their pants in outrage hearing that - proclaimed to the world from their very own ultra-liberal pulpit. Not that it altered their view one iota, of course.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/10/2009 16:12]