If only because of professional courtesy on his part and an inbred sense of what the Spanish call delicadeza, which best translates in this case as refined discretion, I really did not expect Vittorio Messori to review LOTW, since he had done a similar project with then Cardinal Ratzinger and another one with John Paul II. And indeed, he has not. But he did make two brief comments early on about the Pope's condom remarks...
The first was a comment made to Apcom the day that OR came out with its ill-advised excerpts that included the partial remarks on condoms. This is what APCOM wrote:
'A charitable act'
Translated from
...For the writer Vittorio Messori, what the Pope said was 'a charitable act".
"Nothing in it affects the ethical guidelines of the Magisterium. Benedict XVI was referring to the use of a condom not for contraceptive purposes but for a charitable reason, in the case of a prostitute who would use a condom to avoid infecting a partner", Messori said.
He likened it to the practice in medieval times of 'suspending the marital act' in times of the plague.
The second was something he wrote two days later in APERITIVO, the column he has carried over to La Bussola Quotidiana:
Better to say less
Translated from
November 23, 2010
Once more a statement by the Pope, isolated from its context, has been exploited, and Benedict XVI is now being 'hung by his words', as it has happened many times before.
Without observing a minimum of prudence, none other than
L'Osservatore Romano had to choose to include - out of all the many parts in Peter Seewald's interview-book - that in which the Pope speaks of condom use, and even worse, published only part of what he said and without appropriate context.
It was obvious that worldwide media attention would focus on it right away. And this nth communications error leads us to note once again that the Pope is, in fact, ill-served by those who should he aiding him in the Vatican.
In my opinion, there is another problem that is mounting. Perhaps it is time for the Church to cut down on words, on the documents, the interventions, verbosity in general, because of the increasing risk that these words will be exploited and misrepresented - and end up having the Pope, and the Church, in general, appear to say something different from what was really intended.
On a more general issue, I have much to dispute, for a change, with Mr. Mastroianni in the following piece.
How many blunders must the media make
before they understand this Pope?
by Bruno Mastroianni
Translated from
Dec. 9, 2010
They criticized him for what he said about condoms and AIDS, only to find out that most experts say he is right about it.
They mocked him for the ordinariates he conceived for disaffected Anglicans, saying these would be unsuitable for them - and now we have at least five bishops, dozens of priests, and their parishioners who plan to be in full communion with Rome by Easter.
They sought to show he was in the midst of the cover-up for offending priests, and now documents from 1988 show that he had tried even then to make canon law more adaptable for dealing with such cases (and even the
New York Times has acknowledged this).
They have always called him conservative. They have sought to set him against the Jews, against Muslims, against secular intellectuals [ironically, the new rector of La Sapienza University* has invited him to the university after the January 2008 cancellation of the Pope's visit).
It seems that the 'Ratzinger case' is emblematic of the state of the secular West in its confrontation with Christianity: continually dousing it with cold water.
['Cold water' is hardly the metaphor for it. I'd say poisoned pitchforks, voodoo spells and lightning bolts!]
Even Wikileaks has revealed the confusion and surprise of so-called diplomatic analysts of the US State department, relying on badly digested reports in the Italian media, that Joseph Ratzinger came to be elected Pope.
The point is always the same: in seeking to pigeonhole the Catholic faith in the smug socio-political-economic categories of the dominant culture, the seculars keep making blunders one after the other
[with respect to this Pope]. [Of course, they do not consider them blunders at all, and will continue to perpetrate their lies and half-truths because they have invested so much already].
Perhaps it is time for them to change their outlook.
[But they won't, because to do that would be to ask them to change their ideology.]
They do not need to operate any Copernican revolution in their thought.
{But that's what changing ideology amounts to!] They simply need to learn the lessons that are abundant from the heap of blunders they have made so far.
[Mastroianni has to be heavily ironic here, because there is not a snowball's chance in hell that MSM and dominant secular thought will change, as long as the Church and her Pope continue to prevail! What I find most galling is that these opponents appear to treat Benedict XVI as simply another stubborn old curmudgeon without a brain, instead of the superior intellectual and eminently reasonable man that he is. Has the media ever treated the Dalai Lama or Billy Graham as scornfully and disrespectfully as they habitually treat our Pope? Even a scoundrel like the 'Reverend' Al Sharpton gets more respect. But then, of course, he is black, and he is not German, much less Catholic!]
[*For readers who may be unaware of the La Sapienza reference, university management had invited the Pope in January 2008 to give the keynote address for the winter academic year at Italy's largest university (40,000 students, 2000 professors) - it was founded by a Pope in the 14th century but became a state university with the unification of Italy in the 1860s). Then, because of a media-inflated protest by 67 professors in the physics department, based on an erroneous Wikipedia entry attributing an anti-Galileo statement to Cardinal Ratzinger, management capitulated and scaled down the Pope's participation to being just one of a number of speakers. Bad enough under the circumstances.
When a small core of leftist students decided to call on labor unions all over Italy to join a protest demonstration during the event, the Pope decided against going in order to avoid any possible incidents that would involve the demonstrators and bystanders. Instead, he sent a copy of the address he meant to deliver - one, by the way, that should have been included with the Regensburg, Bernardins and Westminster Hall addresses that will be the subject of seminars in the Diocese of Rome next month.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/12/2010 22:12]