Heads are exploding all over the Catholic Right (boom, boom, and boom) not because Pope Benedict has altered official Catholic teaching on condoms. (There is no official Catholic teaching on condoms per se.) It’s because (as the estimable Austin Ivereigh makes clear) Pope Benedict has countermanded what the Catholic Right would have you believe is…

Michele Bachmann is such a fan of faith-based initiatives that Bachmann and Associates, the Christian counseling center she co-owns with her husband, has received $30,000 in Minnesota state funds over the past three years. It’s a place where, according to Dr. Marcus Bachmann, Jesus Christ is the “Almighty Counselor.” Comes now the Park51 Islamic cultural…

So now Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi has gone to the mountain and come back with confirmation that the pope not only said what he meant but also meant what Austin Ivereigh said he meant–that the use of condoms for the sake of preventing infection was a step in the right moral direction for women…

That is the question. In the usual manner, there’s that tendency for those who like the way a papal statement sounds to make too much of it, and those who don’t, to make too little. And in the case of Benedict’s remarks on the use of condoms to prevent AIDS (“a first step in the…

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