In the 10 July 2009 edition of the New York Times, an article asserts that the Vatican treats Obama differently than the US Catholic leadership.
What are your thoughts or observations?
Filed under: Culture, Personal Reflections, Politics
July 11, 2009 • 4:39 pm 0
Do you think that the US Catholic community treats Obama differently than the Vatican?
May 27, 2009 • 1:19 pm 0
Galileo Anniversary Ignites Faith-Science Dialogue
Vatican Joins in Year of Astronomy Conference
By Carmen Elena Villa
FLORENCE, Italy, MAY 26, 2009 ( Zenit.org ).- There is a fundamental dialogue between faith and reason, and an international conference on Galileo can serve to prove it, according to the archbishop of Florence.
Archbishop Giuseppe Betori affirmed this in speaking of the conference under way in his archdiocese on “The Galileo Affair: A Historical, Philosophical and Theological Re-examination.”
The event was inaugurated today at the Basilica of the Holy Cross, where Galileo is buried. It is an initiative of the Jesuits’ Niels Stensen Foundation, and is part of the celebrations for the International Year of Astronomy sponsored by UNESCO.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano was at the inauguration. The conference will feature 33 speakers and has brought together 18 institutions, including the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Pontifical Academy of Science, and the Vatican Observatory.
Archbishop Betori spoke about Galileo and the Church. He asserted that the case has been read for centuries as a “tragic and reciprocal lack of understanding,” reported L’Osservatore Romano.
The prelate said he wants the Year of Astronomy to “re-establish and present again in a creative way the fundamental dialogue that exists between faith and reason, from the perspective of a permanent collaboration between the Church and institutions of scientific investigation, economic development and social promotion.”
“Faith does not grow with the rejection of rationality but rather integrates itself in a more ample horizon of rationality,” Archbishop Betori added.
When reason is separated from faith, he continued, the risk arises “of being reduced to a calculation and an exclusive evaluation of conflicting interests.” In this way, it “often is unaware of or remains blind to the vital questions, fundamental values and dramatic human situations.”
According to the archbishop, the Galileo conference has “not only a high cultural and symbolic value, but also shows that there are conditions for a constructive sharing of responsibilities, in the awareness of respective roles and tasks.”
The event ends May 30 in Florence, in the last home where Galileo lived.
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On the Net:
The Galileo Affair: www.galileo2009.org/en/index.php
Filed under: Faith&Science
April 29, 2009 • 6:31 pm 0
Vatican newspaper: No radical changes in Obama’s first 100 days
LOSSERVATORE-OBAMA Apr-29-2009 (280 words) xxxi
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Vatican newspaper said President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office have not confirmed the Catholic Church’s worst fears about radical policy changes in ethical areas.
The comments came in a front-page article April 29 in L’Osservatore Romano, under the headline, “The 100 days that did not shake the world.” It said the new president has operated with more caution than predicted in most areas, including economics and international relations.
“On ethical questions, too — which from the time of the electoral campaign have been the subject of strong worries by the Catholic bishops — Obama does not seem to have confirmed the radical innovations that he had discussed,” it said.
It said the new draft guidelines for stem-cell research, for example, did not constitute the major change in policy that was foreseen a few months ago.
“(The guidelines) do not allow the creation of new embryos for research or therapeutic purposes, for cloning or for reproductive ends, and federal funds may be used only for experimentation with excess embryos,” it said.
It added that the new guidelines “do not remove the reasons for criticism in the face of unacceptable forms of bioengineering” but are “less permissive” than expected.
The article saw a positive sign in the recent introduction of the Pregnant Women Support Act, which would help women overcome problems that often cause them to have abortions. It was sponsored by a group of pro-life Democrats.
“It is not a negation of the doctrine expressed up to now by Obama in the matter of interruption of pregnancy, but the legislative project could represent a rebalancing in support of maternity,” the newspaper said.
Filed under: Politics, Social Doctrine
April 19, 2009 • 7:33 pm 1
Pope: UN racism conference ‘important’
Pope: UN racism conference ‘important’ By FRANCES D’EMILIO
The Associated Press April 19, 2009 ยป
Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday praised this week’s U.N. anti-racism conference and urged countries to join forces to eliminate intolerance, as the Vatican appeared to distance itself from the U.S. boycott of the meeting.
The conference beginning Monday in Geneva is an important initiative, the pope said, because ‘even today, despite the lessons of history, such deplorable phenomena take place.’
Some countries are boycotting the meeting to protest language in the meeting’s final document that they say could single out Israel for criticism and restrict free speech. Among those countries is the United States. The State Department said Saturday that the Obama administration would not join the conference ‘with regret.’ But department spokesman Robert Wood said the U.S. was ‘profoundly committed to ending racism’ and would work with all people and nations ‘to build greater resolve and enduring political will to halt racism and discrimination wherever it occurs.’
Italy has also said it would skip the weeklong conference if changes are not made at the last minute. The Netherlands announced on Sunday that it would not go to the conference because some nations are using it as a platform to attack the West.
‘The Holy See is distancing itself from the criticisms of some Western countries,’ Asia News, a Catholic news agency that is part of the missionary arm of the Vatican, said of Benedict’s words. Benedict said he sincerely hoped that delegates who attend the conference work together, ‘with a spirit of dialogue and reciprocal acceptance, to put an end to every form of racism, discrimination and intolerance.
‘ Such an effort, Benedict said, would be ‘a fundamental step toward the affirmation of the universal value of the dignity of man and his rights.’ Benedict told pilgrims at the papal vacation retreat in Castel Gandolfo that the declaration, born out of the first world conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, recognized that ‘all peoples and persons form one human family, rich in diversity.’ But beyond such declarations, firm and concrete action is needed at national and international levels, he said.
The Vatican, an independent city state, holds observer status at the United Nations. It had already announced it will send a delegation to Geneva for the racism conference. Monsignor Silvano Maria Tomasi, the Vatican’s diplomat for the U.N. based in Geneva, had said some weeks ago that the Vatican was hoping that a ‘balanced’ final declaration could emerge from the conference, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.
Filed under: Culture, Politics, Social Justice
March 29, 2009 • 7:52 pm 2
The Pope May Be Right: Condom/HIV discussion continues
By Edward C. Green
Sunday, March 29, 2009; Page A15
When Pope Benedict XVI commented this month that condom distribution isn’t helping, and may be worsening, the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, he set off a firestorm of protest. Most non-Catholic commentary has been highly critical of the pope. A cartoon in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted in The Post, showed the pope somewhat ghoulishly praising a throng of sick and dying Africans: “Blessed are the sick, for they have not used condoms.”
Yet, in truth, current empirical evidence supports him.
We liberals who work in the fields of global HIV/AIDS and family planning take terrible professional risks if we side with the pope on a divisive topic such as this. The condom has become a symbol of freedom and — along with contraception — female emancipation, so those who question condom orthodoxy are accused of being against these causes. My comments are only about the question of condoms working to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa’s generalized epidemics — nowhere else.
In 2003, Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen of the University of California conducted a condom effectiveness study for the United Nations’ AIDS program and found no evidence of condoms working as a primary in HIV-prevention measure in Africa. UNAIDS quietly disowned the study. (The authors eventually managed to publish their findings in the quarterly Studies in Family Planning.) Since then, major articles in other peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, Science and BMJ have confirmed that condoms have not worked as a primary intervention in the population-wide epidemics of Africa. In a 2008 article in Science called ” Reassessing HIV Prevention ” 10 AIDS experts concluded that “consistent condom use has not reached a sufficiently high level, even after many years of widespread and often aggressive promotion, to produce a measurable slowing of new infections in the generalized epidemics of Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Let me quickly add that condom promotion has worked in countries such as Thailand and Cambodia, where most HIV is transmitted through commercial sex and where it has been possible to enforce a 100 percent condom use policy in brothels (but not outside of them). In theory, condom promotions ought to work everywhere. And intuitively, some condom use ought to be better than no use. But that’s not what the research in Africa shows.
Why not?
One reason is “risk compensation.” That is, when people think they’re made safe by using condoms at least some of the time, they actually engage in riskier sex.
Another factor is that people seldom use condoms in steady relationships because doing so would imply a lack of trust. (And if condom use rates go up, it’s possible we are seeing an increase of casual or commercial sex.) However, it’s those ongoing relationships that drive Africa’s worst epidemics. In these, most HIV infections are found in general populations, not in high-risk groups such as sex workers, gay men or persons who inject drugs. And in significant proportions of African populations, people have two or more regular sex partners who overlap in time. In Botswana, which has one of the world’s highest HIV rates, 43 percent of men and 17 percent of women surveyed had two or more regular sex partners in the previous year.
These ongoing multiple concurrent sex partnerships resemble a giant, invisible web of relationships through which HIV/AIDS spreads. A study in Malawi showed that even though the average number of sexual partners was only slightly over two, fully two-thirds of this population was interconnected through such networks of overlapping, ongoing relationships.
So what has worked in Africa? Strategies that break up these multiple and concurrent sexual networks — or, in plain language, faithful mutual monogamy or at least reduction in numbers of partners, especially concurrent ones. “Closed” or faithful polygamy can work as well.
In Uganda’s early, largely home-grown AIDS program, which began in 1986, the focus was on “Sticking to One Partner” or “Zero Grazing” (which meant remaining faithful within a polygamous marriage) and “Loving Faithfully.” These simple messages worked. More recently, the two countries with the highest HIV infection rates, Swaziland and Botswana, have both launched campaigns that discourage people from having multiple and concurrent sexual partners.
Don’t misunderstand me; I am not anti-condom. All people should have full access to condoms, and condoms should always be a backup strategy for those who will not or cannot remain in a mutually faithful relationship. This was a key point in a 2004 “consensus statement” published and endorsed by some 150 global AIDS experts, including representatives the United Nations, World Health Organization and World Bank. These experts also affirmed that for sexually active adults, the first priority should be to promote mutual fidelity. Moreover, liberals and conservatives agree that condoms cannot address challenges that remain critical in Africa such as cross-generational sex, gender inequality and an end to domestic violence, rape and sexual coercion.
Surely it’s time to start providing more evidence-based AIDS prevention in Africa.
The writer is a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health
Filed under: AIDS, Personal Reflections, Politics
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