What Benedict Actually Said

You've read the press accounts in which the Pope allegedly spoke of protecting the rainforests from destruction in the same vein as protecting heterosexuals from homosexuality. The actual text, brought to us by Rocco, is more complex, but essentially argues that the forms of male and female as created by God can know of no complexity or variance. The fact of same-sex sexual and emotional orientation - displayed throughout nature and expressed by human beings since the beginning of time - is, in the Pope's view, a divine error. The entire universe must fit into the binary Thomist vision, or we are allegedly divorcing humankind from our own nature. And nature must be divorced from all new knowledge of the human and animal sciences. Well: at least the knowledge we have gained since the Middle Ages.

Read the whole thing. There is little new in it, although that is not a criticism for a Pope. What I found telling is how this Pope, in his summary of the recent history of the Church, simply erases the Second Council from reality - just as he erases homosexual orientation from the arena of open inquiry or meditation. For Catholics, this passage will say a lot (which is why, of course, it never made it into the headlines):

The year just concluding has been rich by way of retrospective glances on important moments in the recent history of the Church, but also rich in events which carry within them pointers to direct our journey towards the future. Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII died, fifty years ago John XXIII was elected Pope, Forty years have passed since the publication of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, and thirty years since the death of its author, Pope Paul VI.

The encyclical banning all forms of contraception eclipses the entire Second Council for this Pope. We have not yet really absorbed what a reactionary he is.

(Photo: Christophe Simon/Getty.)