God’s work is awfully fragile, isn’t it?  God should have used super-glue.

Again:

Until he sends Bernard Law back to Boston to face prosecution for his crimes and stops rewarding him for the same with a luxorious apartment suite at the Vatican and $12K+/month spending money, the Pope can shut the fuck up.

Until he disciplines the Bishopry—instead of rewarding them—for protecting the reputation of their brother priests over the lifelong, soul-deep damage to children, he can shut the fuck up.

He has no moral authority to discus ANYTHING until he has dealt with the pedophilia and the cover up.  And no, homosexual =/= pedarast, so that’s not it.

Shut up, Ratzi.  The least you could do, NaziJungen, is apologize for the Vatican’s lack of courage during the Holocaust.  Oh, and you could excommunicate Hitler while you’re at it.  Shouldn’t be too controversial to claim he’s not a Catholic in good standing.

The intended role of a man is to remain celibate except when young boys are around.  Or at least stand by while other men indulge themselves.

And so ends another lesson from People Who Have No Business in Other Peoples’ Business.

(ramble)

The Vatican’s instructions on homosexuality = celibacy reminds me of a editorial I’d read a few years back from some idiot who wanted us to start shaming illegitimate children again like we did in the good old days. The reason? Because one of his favorite poems was written by an illegitimate person who was not allowed to marry the woman he loved because he was a bastard and thus deemed not worthy of her by her parents and the poem was written out of his utter despair. So if we start shaming the bastards again, everyone benefits because we get better poems out of it. Everyone but the bastards, that is, whose twisted human wreckage of the soul will be fed into the furnace that operates the awesome-poem generator.

If you’re gay and you want to be a priest, more power to you. And if you feel like you’re going to be anything other than a scapegoat every time the Catholic church aids and abets child molesters, then I’m not going to argue with your calling. But this argument, which is the same argument that Rick Warren has put forth—is bullshit. We see no evidence that God wishes us to send our souls to early hell in the hopes that we will glorify Him more as the hollowness inside of us eats away at our humanity. Declaring that gay people have a “special calling” in the clergy because God requires celibacy from homosexuals in order to allow them into heaven is an evil thing to say for precisely that reason.

(/ramble)

What Caren said. 

The man is a criminal.

Hey, I’m all for saving gays….

Oh.  He means CHANGING gays.  Never mind.

The pope said humanity needed to “listen to the language of creation” to understand the intended roles of man and woman. He compared behavior beyond traditional heterosexual relations as “a destruction of God’s work.”

When’s he holding a fire sale on all those Michaelangelo sculptures and paintings in the Vatican? If Ratzi’s really committed to this, he’ll want to replace them with something more wholesome.

The Papists are in league with the Illuminati to attack The Heartland of the USA of America with fluoride chemtrails, which act as an attractant to mega-flocks of rabid pelicans that endanger the citizenry.  The Pope also drinks the blood of Jewish babies in the company of reptilian Greys in deep underground military bases funded by the Rothchilds and maintained by Mr. President Cheney as detailed in detail on the label of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

*sigh* The Reuters post looks like it has heavily redacted his speech.  Is there a link anywhere to the original?

Darth Sidious steps in it again.

Ah, here’s a link to the original speech. Alas, it’s in Italian; if there are any speakers here, could they give us their opinion on whether the Reuters comment fairly represents the Pope’s comments?

Funny, I don’t remember any California constitutional amendments banning deforestation.  One can only hope that the Pope treats “curing” gays with the same zealousness that he treats environmentalism.  Every major city will be like down town San Fransisco on gay pride day by the end of next year.

Exactly when is the RCC going to maybe look into the design of a committee to comtemplate the possiblity of a council to remove the great big fucking log from their eye before they start looking at other people’s motes?

Because some guy was rather insistent about that.  Of course, with Papa Ratz in charge, said guy would probably be chucked in an oven for being Jewish - and daring to possibly be more important that Prada-Lich.

Here’s a very quick and rough translation of the relevant paragraph:

Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of christian Belief, the Church can not and must not limit itself to transmit the message of salvation. It has a responsibility towards the creation and must publicly assert this responsibility. And in doing so it must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. It must also protect man against his own destruction. It is necessary for there to be something like an ecology of man, meant in the right way. It’s not outdated metaphysics, if the Church speaks of the nature of man as man and woman and demands that this order of creation is respected. The matter here is faith in the Creator and listening to the message of creation, the contempt of which would be self-destruction of man and therefore destruction of God’s own work. What is often expressed and meant with the “gender” term, ultimately resolves into self-emancipation of man from creation and Creator. Man wants to make himself and dispose of what concerns him always and exclusively on his own. But in this way he lives against truth, he lives against the creating Spirit. Tropical rainforests deserve our protection, they do, but deserves it no less man as a creature, in which is inscribed a message that doesn’t mean the contradiction of our freedom, but its condition. Great Scholastic theologists qualified marriage, that is the lifelong bond between man and woman, as the sacrament of creation, which was instituted by the Creator himself and which Christ - without altering the message of creation - then welcomed in the story of salvation as the sacrament of the new alliance. It’s part of the announcement the Church must carry, the testimony in favor of the creating Spirit existing in nature as a whole and in the nature of man in particular, created in the image of God. We should reread the Humana vitae encyclic starting from this perspective: the intention of Pope Pius VI was to defend love against sexuality as consumption, the future against the pretense of exclusivity of the present and the nature of man against its manipulation.

Sorry for the typos up there; the man pisses me off.

As for ‘protecting love from sexuality as consumption’, unless he’s talking about stopping the sexual slave trade, he really needs to shut up.  He is utterly without a clue.

It would help if he actually listened to his laity, especially the women (female persons of the opposite sex in VaticanSpeak).  He might learn something, and thereby gain some wisdom and perhaps the ability to advise.

However, as above, until he gets it straight about priests sexually abusing children, i.e., that the CHILDREN are the victims and protecting the criminals is what really damages the church, he should really just shut the fuck up.

Funny, I don’t remember any California constitutional amendments banning deforestation.

Virtually every scientist on Earth believes environmental despoilage is a threat to human life as we know it.  I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until they say the same about homosexuality! !111 ! !!

WOOHOO!  I’m destroying god’s work!  Damn, I can die and feel like I accomplished something now.

As for ‘protecting love from sexuality as consumption’, unless he’s talking about stopping the sexual slave trade, he really needs to shut up.  He is utterly without a clue.

Caren, that’s just the thing, isn’t it? There are people who do need saving, from sexual exploitation, from a mysogynist view of sexuality, from the power imbalance that leads to scumbags perpetrating vile acts against others.

But, no, forget about sex slaves and child rape victims and intimate partner violence - gotta stop folks from engaging in consensual sexual activities with someone who has the same genitals!

As for ‘protecting love from sexuality as consumption’, unless he’s talking about stopping the sexual slave trade, he really needs to shut up.

Er, Caren, he could very well be talking about pornography, prostitution and the use of sexual imagery in advertising…

Whis has what to do with homosexuality, PIATOR?

Also, I don’t know if it’s a translation issue, but the text of that address is awfully close to word salad.

Pope Palpatine.

mothworm: the Italian original is very archaic in sentence construction, very hard to render into English. I almost always translated sentence structure literally. But he does say “creator”, “creation” and “creating” a whole lot

Dang it.  CHV beat me to it.  Serves me right for not carefully reading the comment thread before I post.

A little non-procreative sex seems plenty ecological to me…

“There are people who do need saving, from sexual exploitation, from a mysogynist view of sexuality”

Those aren’t people; they’re women.

/religious fundamentalist

Er, Caren, he could very well be talking about pornography, prostitution and the use of sexual imagery in advertising…

Well, yeah, Piotr, he could, but he’s not.  You see, when you read the whole thing, and not just that sentence out of context, there’s very little wiggle room.

He rather clearly references the Humanae vitae which is about banning contraception—a decision out of the blue that flew in the face of the requested advice from the laity.  He’s currently throwing a little snit fit about IVF, because children shouldn’t be “products of production”.  He thinks homosexuality is as destructive to mankind as the loss of the rainforest.  Seriously, the man is in a world all of his own that has little to do with the realities the majority of the world deals with daily.

And make no mistake, when he says “mankind” he means “MANkind”.  Women are “female persons of the opposite sex” whenever they need to be referenced at all.

But even if he were talking about porn or the slave-trade, he still needs to shut the fuck up till he cleans his own household.  He has no moral authority whatsoever until he does so.  As long as he’s willing to sacrifice children and reward the men who enabled the child sacrifice, he needs to shut the fuck up.

Shut up Benedict, and resume fellating Cardinal Gänswein. Feel shameful about it (after you swallow) and absolve yourself. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Maybe the Pope could bless gay people out of their sexuality. After all, you don’t see anymore homosexual Ferraris driving around, do you? It’s the magic Popey touch.

Honestly, would it be too much to ask for those members of the Catholic hierarchy who personally helped enable and protect child-molesting priests be fitted with devices that would deliver a mild, harmless, but nevertheless unpleasant electrical shock every time they opened their greasy little mouths and spurted out this kind of quasi-theological diarrhea?

Ok, ok, I don’t really want that.  But seriously, how dare they presume to pontificate about sexual morality at all,  much less attack people just trying to do their best in normal, mature, consensual relationships with other adults.  You’d think they’d go hide in shame, or wander around the countryside in uncomfortable clothes begging for forgiveness (more hygienic than self-flagellation, after all, not they’d do that), or at the very least take some time to sit quietly in the corner and contemplate what they did wrong.  Instead, they keep dribbling out these gobs of shit, apparently utterly shamelessly.  The financial executives who keep zipping around in private jets and receiving multimillion dollar bonuses despite their . . . somewhat less than stellar performance have nothing on these guys; they should be taking notes.

“and listening to the message of creation”

I tried, but all I got was some crappy soft jazz and an occasional reminder that my call was important to them, but all Agents were busy, and to please stay on the line . . .

(Alternately - I tried, but all I got was a recorded voice saying, at the beep, the time will be 13.8 billion years, 2 months, 16 days, 5 hours, 36 minutes, and 42 seconds . . .)

(Aternately, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firas_spectrum.jpg.

Frankly, I’m waiting for the pope to start going on about how we need to live in small nomadic kin-based bands of generally rather less than one hundred, with a diet based on gathered plants and wild game, with high levels of infant mortality and often frequent low-level inter- and/or intra-group violence.

“man as a creature, in which is inscribed a message that doesn’t mean the contradiction of our freedom, but its condition.”

Reminds me of this bit from Terry Pratchett’s Hat Full of Sky:

“There is something called the Doctrine of Signatures.  It works like this: When the Creator of the Universe made helpful plants for the use of people, he (or in some versions, she) put little clues on them to give people hints.  A plant useful for toothache would look like teeth, one to cure earache would look like an ear, one good for nose problems would drip green goo, and so on.  Many people believed this. 
You had to use a certain amount of imagination to be good at it (but not much in the case of Nose Dropwort), and in Tiffany’s world the Creator had gotten a little more . . . creative.  Some plants had writing on them, if you knew where to look.  It was often hard to find and usually difficult to read, because plants can’t spell.  Most people didn’t even know about it and just used the traditional method of finding out whatever plants were poisonous or useful by testing them out on some elderly aunt they didn’t need, but Miss Level was pioneering new techniques that she hoped would mean life would be better for everyone (and in the case of the aunts, often longer, too).
“This one is False Gentian,” she told Tiffany . . . “Everyone thinks it’s just another toothache cure, but just look at the cut root by stored moonlight, using my blue magnifying glass . . .”
Tiffany tried it, and read “GoOD F4r Colds May cors drowsiness Do Not oprate heavE mashinry.”
“Terrible spelling, but not bad for a daisy,” said Miss Level.
“You mean plants really tell you how to use them?” said Tiffany.
“Well, not all of them, and you have to know where to look,” said Miss Level.  “Look at this, for example, on the common walnut.  You have the use the green magnifying glass by the light of a taper made from red cotton, thus . . .”
Tiffany squinted.  The letters were small and hard to read.
“‘May contain Nut’?” she ventured.  “But it’s a nutshell.  Of course it’ll contain a nut . . . ”

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_signatures)

Although much of what passes itself off as ‘Catholic anthropology more resembles medieval bestiaries, in the way actual facts about nature are subjugated - or perhaps more accurately, unknown, of no interest and irrelevant - to dreary moralizing and fevered theological obsessions . . .

Well, yeah, Piotr, he could, but he’s not.  You see, when you read the whole thing, and not just that sentence out of context, there’s very little wiggle room.

“We should reread the Humana vitae encyclic starting from this perspective: the intention of Pope Pius VI was to defend love against sexuality as consumption, the future against the pretense of exclusivity of the present and the nature of man against its manipulation.”

Okay, so a bit of research shows “humanae vitae” to be a bit of waffle about fidelity in marriage and a whole lot of waffle about not using the Pill or wrapping the willies.  And, my God, it is waffle.

So I think I’m wrong and you’re right.  Boiled down, it’s “Teh Gay is all about the sex, ‘cos there’s no chance of kiddies”.

What gets me is the automatic assumption that EVERYONE will go gay the minute they stop preaching against it.

I have heard the “If everyone was gay, we’d all die out” argument more times than I care to count. My response is “And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon.”

They discount people who are strongly heterosexual (we knew my youngest was straight by the time she was 2), who are already practicing heterosexuals, and bisexuals can just go wait in the truck.

Just chiming in to say: That photograph. Eesh. Pope Boris Karloff the First really is one gruesome looking motherfucker, ain’t he?