Unless he accepts the Church must reform, 2011 will be the same, says Belfast journalist
Malachy O’Doherty writing in the Belfast Telegraph, Dec 5, says The Vatican has a ready answer for most of the Pope’s critics; this is that “they have not properly understood the papal reasoning”. Are we scholastic philosophers, canon lawyers or theologians? Then how can we expect to have grasped the nuances of the words chosen by the Holy Father?
So, when a German journalist represented Benedict as having relaxed the Catholic Church’s condemnation of the use of condoms, the clarifications left us wondering if anything had changed at all.
It appears that the Pope had considered that a gay man using a condom to spare his partner the risk of infection might be approaching something like Christian consideration for the welfare of another.
The analogy might be with a crash helmet. If you take someone for a ride at 100mph on a motorbike, without insurance or a licence, you still might be a sinner and a law-breaker and yet have demonstrated some generosity – even compassion – in offering that person protective headgear.
That the Pope has not previously refined his reasoning to this extent doesn’t mean that he has actually come up with something new; the implications were always obvious.
And the use of a condom to protect a woman from an unwanted pregnancy remains a sin – on a par with the sin of the gay man having sex on any occasion at all.
An increasing problem for the papacy in 2011 will be that more and more people think that these are hairs that a mature human being should not be splitting – least of all one who is not now trusted to play with a straight bat in the field of sexual morality.
For while the Pope regards gay sex as “intrinsically disordered”, he – even now – seems unable to accept responsibility for the disordered men in his Church who raped children.
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