The Media Reporting That The Media Misreports

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The excerpt below is from National Review Online, a non-Catholic site. The author is not a Catholic.

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The Pope Plays It Right
By Johan Goldberg
November, 24, 2010

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Over the weekend, the media misreported that Benedict had renounced the Roman Catholic Church's longstanding "policy" against condom use. I put "policy" in quotes because the media have a tendency to portray all church positions as if they were like rules for trash pickup: easily changed or abandoned upon papal or bureaucratic whim. That's not how it works.

What Benedict said in a book-length interview is that in certain circumstances using a condom would be less bad than not using one. To use Benedict's example, a male prostitute with HIV would be acting more responsibly, more morally, if he wore a condom while plying his trade than if he didn't.

The pontiff understands that not all harms are equal. Assault is wrong, for instance, but assault with a deadly weapon is more wrong than assault with a non-deadly one. Recognizing and limiting the harm you do can be the "first step in the direction of a moralization, a first act of responsibility in developing anew an awareness of the fact that not everything is permissible."

Now, I'm not on the same page as the Vatican on all matters of sexuality, never mind theology. But I respect the Church's position. And, given the core assumptions of Catholic moral thought, I think Benedict's reasoning is sound.

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It's a tired trope for Church critics to glibly suggest that the Vatican has the blood of millions on its hands because it doesn't back condom distribution, particularly in Africa. That is as absurd as it is unprovable. The Church's opposition to corruption, ethnic violence, and murder are just as pronounced and resolute, and yet such maladies persist in Africa as well. Are we to believe that African male prostitutes...were simply following Church doctrine when they declined to use condoms?

Meanwhile, the Church does perhaps more than any other institution to aid the sick and feed the hungry in Africa, something you certainly can't say about many of [her] critics....

As for the Church's prreferred approach--abstinence until marriage--it may be impractical in most parts of the world, as the critics claim. But it would undeniably save more lives than condom use if put into practice. What seems to offend many isn't the efficacy of the solution but the suggestion that such values have any place in the modern world.

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Read the entire article here.
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It's good to see that there are still some people in the media who do not do their reporting through an agenda.
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