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Loading ...Vatican accuses AIDS groups of intimidation
04.17.2009 2:22pm EDT
(Vatican City) The Vatican on Friday denounced the criticisms of the pope’s comments about condoms and AIDS during his trip to Africa, saying they marked an unprecedented attempt to intimidate him into silence.
Pope Benedict XVI said last month that condoms weren’t the answer to Africa’s AIDS epidemic and could make the problem worse.France, Germany, the U.N. AIDS-fighting agency as well as the British medical journal The Lancet criticized the comments as irresponsible and dangerous. The Belgian parliament passed a resolution calling them “unacceptable” and demanding that the government officially protest.
Belgium’s ambassador to the Holy See lodged the formal protest April 15, prompting the strongly worded Vatican statement Friday.
Criticizing the Belgian vote, the Vatican said it deplored “the fact that a parliamentary assembly should have thought it appropriate to criticize the Holy Father on the basis of an isolated extract from an interview, separated from its context.”
It said the remarks had been “used by some groups with a clear intent to intimidate, as if to dissuade the Pope from expressing himself on certain themes of obvious moral relevance and from teaching the Church’s doctrine.”
It wasn’t immediately clear which groups the Vatican was referring to. The Belgian resolution, which passed April 2, said Benedict’s comments ran against numerous international declarations and actions taken by the United Nations and others who have been fighting AIDS and other transmittable diseases such as malaria.
It said they were “unacceptable” and that the Belgian government didn’t share them.
A similar resolution is under consideration by the Belgian Senate.
In its statement, the Vatican decried what it said was an “unprecedented media campaign” in Europe that was unleashed by the pope’s remarks about condoms, while ignoring Benedict’s fuller message about the need to care for those suffering from AIDS.
The Vatican said it was consoled that Africans and “the true friends of Africa” had praised and appreciated the pontiff’s remarks.
The 82-year-old pope, who marks his fourth anniversary as pontiff on Sunday, has faced enormous criticism recently. In addition to the uproar over his condom comments, his decision to remove the excommunication of a bishop who denied the Holocaust sparked outcry, even within his own church.
LMAO!
The catholic “church” (lower case intended) has the b@lls to accuse someone of intimidation? THEM? ARE THEY JOKING?
Here is hoping the walls of St. Peter’s Basillica come tumbling down about their egotistical ears!
HA!
Something has got to get him to shut up about things he knows nothing of.
too bad he already came to the us. I should have spoken out more loudly to my connections at State to not give him a visa.
Why does someone clearly guilty of hate crimes get a visa to enter our country? Is the vatican part of the EU so none is needed?
This evil representative of an evil cult should be shunned by the world and protested against. The outcry against his condom statement is heartening, and should only be the beginning.
Oh to see the pope mobile caught in a protest and rolled over with his drag outfit tumbling with him like dirty laundry in a front loader!
We need to remember he is a political leader of a COUNTRY…the Vatican is not in Italy, it is an island surrounded by the city of Rome. We need to work diplomatically to isolate them as we do with other pariah states like North Korea and Iran…in fact the vatican has done much more to harm the world than those two states guilty so far of just sabre rattling.
Next time he leaves his little 12 block country, his caravan should be attacked by the mob. He must feel the same isolation he is lashing out against in Brussels’ actions. Good for them.
It’s the 21st century. If the pope insists on being an @$$hole on after-burner, he’s going to get called on it.
His latest inquisition into the fact that US nuns aren’t anti-gay enough is going to blow RIGHT up in his face. Who does he think keeps the schools and parishes OPEN??!!
WOMEN, that’s who. And the Church has treated women like $hit for 2100 years. Eventually they’re going to get tired of it.
Many already have. A LOT of the vocations to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion are ex-Roman-Catholic nuns who couldn’t fulfill their vocations to the priesthood in the Roman Church, which, BTW, will run OUT of priests in approximately 25 years UNLESS they start ordaining married persons, GLBTQAIs, and women.
Perhaps it IS time for the Roman Church to cease to exist.
Don’t you just love the old fascist argument:
I can say anything I want and if you disagree with me, you’re attacking me.
It’s the same thing with the folks that are always crying about PC.
They want to say anything they want about anyone else without anyone saying anything back.
Too bad.
If they can open their freakin’ mouths, then so can anyone else.
The Pope doesn’t like being disagreed with–Awwwww, poor baby.
To Dave W:
You raise an interesting point and remind me of something that seems to have just been quietly swept under the rug.
Remember that Bush entering Canada was illegal and yet he was allowed to do so and wasn’t arrested. In fact, the people to whom he spoke entered into a conspiracy to take him from the airport under the radar, so to speak, to their little clubhouse.
With connections at State, I would be interested to know if you have any insight or information about this and how the Canadian citizens have responded to their government which flouted its own laws.
The shame of it is that, lost in emotion and history of papal distortion on sexual matters, it turns out that the pope was exactly correct in his statements: in Africa condom use has little to no statisitcal correlation to the spread of HIV/AIDS, while in places like Thailand, condom use is effective as a public health strategy.
What works in Africa are programs encouraging people to reduce the number of sexual partners.
What this means is that condoms without education are actually dangerous because men believe that they are free to engage in any type of sexual behavior with impunity.
See the study by Norman Hearst from UCSF for more details.
I’d like to silence that bastard with Duct tape to the mouth – a cinder block tied to his waste and a nearby deep water way.
This is the reason why I became an Anglican 15 years ago. The Pope and the Vatican are irrelevant in today’s modern society. Protestant Democracy will prevail!!!
This freakin’ dude just gets more loony as the days go by! Telling people that condom usage has no effect on lessening the AIDS impact?!? Rooting out homosexuality in WHERE??? Convents??? YIKES! Dykes in the nunnery!! LMFAO!! Next I suppose Been-A-Dick will tell us all that the Illuminati are engaged in an “unprecedented media campaign” to deceive us and that the world is in fact FLAT!! WHAT!! Screams the pope!! “Are you people criticizing me”??? LOL!! This whole scenario just gets more flakier by the f*cking week! Well I for one don’t believe in moons around jupiter. Those are just images that galileo taped up on a solar system chart! Peace out. =))
Actually, I don’t want to intimidate the pope from speaking: the more he opens his mouth the crazier he appears. Let him keep talking and eventually even the brainwashed will realize he’s loony.
the Pope is a complete idiot, the catholic church which I was brought up in needs to fail.
hopefully this pope kicks it faster than jpII
Biblical Theology Bulletin, a Journal of Bible and Theology, has published numerous leading scholars’ articles about the misuse of biblical texts in the condemnation of homosexuality: In 1995, Leland J. White, (Does the Bible Speak about Gays or Same Sex Orientation? BTB 25:14-23); in 2007, an entire issue was devoted to the topic (BTB 37:4) including articles by James A. Sanders (God’s Work in the Secular World), Rosemary Radford Ruether (Love Between Women: A Context for Theology), William Stacey Johnston (Empire and Order: The Gospel and Same-Gender Relationships), Jack Rogers (Presbyterian Guidelines for Biblical Interpretation); in 2008, Ken Stone (Bibles that Matter: Biblical Theology and Queer Performativity, BTB 38:1); Vincent Pizzuto (God Has Made It Plain to Them: An Indictment of Rome’s Hermeneutic of Homophobia, BTB 38:4). http://btb.sagepub.com
as a closeted gay men in the 1950s I was taught to think of myself as criminal, sick, and sinful. Well, no longer criminal (at least in Canada), nor sick
(thanks to the APA for removing the diagnosis), still sinful in the eyes of his holiness I suppose, but that’s his problem not mine. For what it’s worth, Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) was the head of the successor office to the inquisition before he became pope, so no surprise that he is homophobic.
The Vatican is accusing someone of intimidation? That’s rich…