Pontifical incoherence

Maybe it's time for Pope Benedict XVI to retire. He is becoming incoherent -- or at least his conflicting statements and retractions and "clarifications" add up to . . . well, incoherence.

Take the now-fatigued issue of what he said about male prostitutes using a condom -- maybe, sort of, might not be so bad -- or, rather, it might be a step in the direction of taking moral responsibility, or something like that. That doesn't make it right -- just sort of, maybe, all right as the lesser of two evils.

Of course, that is, as long as the reason for using it was to prevent the spread of HIV -- not to prevent pregnancy, heaven forbid. I guess the trick is, as you unroll the condom over you-know-what, you must repeat: this is to prevent HIV, not babies; this is to prevent HIV, not babies. That's why he used the example of male prostitutes (apparently not realizing that women also employ male prostitutes and, ahem, women do get pregnant. Hadn't you heard, Sir?

As an example of how committed the pope and the Vatican are to the non-prevention of pregnancy, they won't even address this in the light of an HIV + man and his wife -- can he use a condom to prevent infecting her? They won't say, except to repeat that the position has not changed. Using any form of birth control is evil. Evil, do you hear?

Seems that the Vatican has a commission studying the question of married couples where one is HIV+. But suddenly their work has been suspended, indefinitely. It's really hard, you know, trying to make sense out of nonsense.

Well, now, months later, the issue still seems unclear -- er, incoherent? So the Vatican released yet another statement to clarify that, of course, the pope did not "recommend the use of condoms under any circumstances." So, what did he say then?

"An action which is objectively evil, even if a lesser evil, can never be licitly willed," the Vatican said. Silly me. That makes it entirely clear. How did I ever misunderstand something so simple?

Now, if that weren't incoherent enough, Pope B. told Vatican officials in his traditional end-of-year speech on Monday that the church needs to look at its own culpability in the child sex-abuse scandal. OK, good start -- but, he hastened to add, he also blamed a secular society in which child pornography "is seemingly considered normal by society."

Say what ???? Which planet are you inhabiting, Benedict?

Never have laws against child pornography been as stringent as they are, at least in the U.S., where it is a felony simply to possess child pornography. A man who has never even touched a child may go to prison for years and years because he downloaded some videos.

I'm not saying it's wrong to go after child pornographers so aggressively. But simple viewers, curiosity seekers? The reasoning, of course, is that any video depicting sex between adults and children means that a child was actually sexually abused in making the video. And possession of the video is aiding and abetting the crime.

What I am saying is that the pope is wrong. It isn't in secular society where child abuse is condoned. It is -- or was -- in the back rooms of the churches and the rectories -- and in the Vatican itself -- where abusive priests were "forgiven," quietly transferred to other parishes where they might work with children again, and their records sealed to protect the priests, not the children.

So, please, Mr. Pope. Don't blame the church's failures on a secular society. Clean your own house; admit your own laxity and culpability. Sir.

Ralph