LittleJingleBellas I KNOW you were mocking and pointing at the Pontiff. This is to be encouraged.
But I also said "I think you should be mocking and pointing at the BBC"
They somehow managed, tabloid fashion to translate this:
"Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest "
From this:
"[The church] must defend not only the earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to all. It must also defend the human person against its own destruction. What?s needed is something like a ?human ecology,? understood in the right sense. It?s not simply an outdated metaphysics if the church speaks of the nature of the human person as man and woman, and asks that this order of creation be respected. Here it?s a question of faith in creation, in listening to the language of creation, disregard of which would mean self-destruction of the human person and hence destruction of the very work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term ?gender? in the end amounts to the self-emancipation of the human person from creation and from the Creator. Human beings want to do everything by themselves, and to control exclusively everything that regards them. But in this way, the human person lives against the truth, against the Creator Spirit. Yes, the tropical forests merit our protection, but the human being as a creature merits no less protection ? a creature in which a message is written which does not imply a contradiction of our liberty, but the condition for it. Great Scholastic theologians defined marriage, meaning the lifetime bond between a man and a woman, as a sacrament of creation, which the Creator instituted and which Christ ? without changing the message of creation ? then welcomed into the story of his covenant with humanity. This witness in favor of the Creator Spirit, present in the nature of this bond and in a special way in the nature of the human person, is also part of the proclamation which the church must offer. Starting from this perspective, it?s important to re-read the encyclical Humanae Vitae : the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against treating sexuality as a kind of consumption, the future against the exclusive demands of the present, and the nature of the human being against manipulation.?
I just can't see anything shocking in that text. Of course it is not politically correct but it would be more newsworthy if it were, given that the Pope is Catholic
There is a grain of an interesting idea in that speech. Without procreation of the influential, there is no incentive to defend future needs against the demands of the present and the desire to consume. The irony being that the Catholic heirarchy have themselves personally chosen against matrimony and procreation. It also conveniently ignores, as so many righteous speeches and texts do, that overpopulation goes hand in hand with overconsumption, but it is interesting all the same.