PJPII: Defender of the Catholic Faith

Fire of Liberty

Mark Steyn has a wonderful defense of The Holy Father in today's Daily Telegraph after reading what the various MSM types in The Guardian and The New York Times tarnish PJPII and his devotion to Catholic doctrine. While there's countless areas that the Pope seemed to be knocked around a lot in these bastions of liberalism is his devotion to abstinence and his refusal to accept condoms as the best solution to fight the spread of AIDS. While the Pope has advocated such policies, the folks in the MSM look at him as a Victorian prude and don't understand how someone can be such an absolutist. I guess it's hard for these cultural elites to realize that the Catholic Church isn't some social function or club that you can get in because it's "the new thing," it's a religion that lays out certain tenets and doctrine that the flock should follow and abide by. If the head of the Catholic Church starts picking his doctrine based on what the press and the various polls say, you stop being the head of a church and become just another shill politician. I for one want a leader of the Catholic Church to be someone who will go before his 1.2 billion followers and state the doctrine of the Church and stick to it. This idea of a Pope being an absolutist to Church doctrine seems to have worked for nearly 2000 years and I vow that it will be the same well into the future.

Though I can ramble on this point for hours to come, I figured I'd give you a sampling of several paragraphs of Mark Steyn's opinion on the media's complaint:

The question now is whether His Holiness was as right about us as he was about the Communists. The secularists, for example, can't forgive him for his opposition to condoms in the context of Aids in Africa. The Dark Continent gets darker every year: millions are dying, male life expectancy is collapsing and such civil infrastructure as there is seems likely to follow.

But the most effective weapon against the disease has not been the Aids lobby's 20-year promotion of condom culture in Africa, but Uganda's campaign to change behaviour and to emphasise abstinence and fidelity - i.e., the Pope's position. You don't have to be a Catholic or a "homophobe" to think that the spread of Aids is telling us something basic - that nature is not sympathetic to sexual promiscuity. If it weren't Aids, it would be something else, as it has been for most of human history.

What should be the Christian response? To accept that we're merely the captives of our appetites, like a dog in heat? Or to ask us to rise to the rank God gave us - "a little lower than the angels" but above "the beasts of the field"? In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), the Pope wrote: "Sexuality too is depersonalised and exploited: it increasingly becomes the occasion and instrument for self-assertion and the selfish satisfaction of personal desires and instincts. Thus the original import of human sexuality is distorted and falsified, and the two meanings, unitive and procreative, inherent in the very nature of the conjugal act, are artificially separated."

While I'm not a Catholic, I at least know that in order for a religion to be believable and needed, it needs to have a set doctrine and individuals like popes and preachers who can defend such doctrine which provides a rock to cleft to when the waters get rough. Or as the Bible says:

"And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter,and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" - Matthew 16: 18