The Pope's Condom Conundrum

An excerpt from Katha Pollitt's latest post on the Pope's comments that condoms can be used in some cases to prevent disease, but not to prevent pregnancy:

The doctrine of the secondary effect, whereby a Catholic may perform an immoral act if its primary effect is moral, permits a doctor to give a dying patient painkillers that may hasten death: the primary purpose is relief of suffering, not euthanasia. By the same logic, the church has always allowed for "just wars" and the deaths of innocents that inevitably take place in them. But, with the exception of those nuns in Congo, this reasoning is rejected when it comes to birth control.

If you ask me, the Pope's on a slippery slope. Katha points out that pregnancy is a deadly prospect in so much of the world. Will the Pope not recognize this as a hardship on women? What about STD prevention? The lives of young girls ruined by teen pregnancy? The doctrine of the double effect is a fine theoretical work. But it has little to do with a raped woman in Congo or a dying patient in Queens who just wants to pass without pain.

Dictatorship of Relativism.

Pope Benedict spoke in Rome the other day.

Here's a clip from the story at Catholic News Agency:

“Policraticus” (The Man of Government), the second work to which Pope Benedict referred, signals the existence of "an objective and immutable truth, whose origin is in God, a truth accessible to human reason and which concerns practical and social activities.” “This is a natural law," said the Pope, "from which human legislation and political and religious authorities must gain their inspiration to promote the common good."

John of Salisbury gave the name “equity” to this concept of natural law, through which every person is given his rights.

"This is the central thesis of Policraticus," said the Pope.

"The question of the relationship between natural law and positive law, as mediated by equity, is still of great importance," remarked the Pontiff. "Above all in some countries, we witness a worrying detachment between reason, that has the task of discovering ethical values tied to the dignity of the human person, and liberty, that has the responsibility of accepting and promoting these values."

If John of Salisbury were here today, conjectured the Pope, he "would remind us that only those laws that to defend the sacredness of human life and reject the legitimacy of abortion, euthanasia and unrestrained genetic experimentation are equitable, those that respect the dignity of matrimony between man and woman, and that are inspired to a correct secularism of the state - secularism that must always allow for the safeguarding of religious freedom - and that seek subsidiarity and solidarity at the national and international level."

"Otherwise," concluded the Pontiff, "we would end up with... "the dictatorship of relativism." That dictatorship "doesn't recognize anything as definite and leaves as its ultimate measure only the self and its desires."