{"id":119,"date":"2010-11-24T10:17:11","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T10:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-right-sheathed-on-condoms.html"},"modified":"2010-11-24T10:17:11","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T10:17:11","slug":"catholic-right-sheathed-on-condoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-right-sheathed-on-condoms.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholic Right Sheathed on Condoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"explodingHeads are exploding all over the Catholic Right (boom<\/a>, boom<\/a>, and boom<\/a>) not because Pope Benedict has altered official Catholic teaching on condoms. (There is<\/i> no official Catholic teaching on condoms per se.) It’s because (as the estimable Austin Ivereigh makes clear<\/a>)
\nPope Benedict has countermanded what the Catholic Right would have you
\nbelieve is official Catholic teaching on condoms. By indicating that the
\nuse of a condom to prevent deadly infection could be a significant step
\nin the right moral direction, he has not only aligned himself with
\nmainstream Catholic moral theology, but also opened for public
\ndiscussion a subject that the Catholic Right has managed to strangle for
\nsome years. Boom!<\/p>\n

“Oh dear, oh dear!” worry the white rabbits of the right. Ordinary Catholics will simply not be able to fathom the nuances <\/i>of such non-black-and-white reasoning. “This is admittedly a difficult distinction to grasp,” George Weigel told the AP<\/a>. What the pontiff was actually <\/i>saying was that
\n“someone determined to do something wrong may be showing a glimmer of
\nmoral common sense by not doing that wrong thing in the worst possible
\nway–which is not an endorsement of anything.”<\/p>\n

Actually, what’s hard to grasp–for ordinary Catholics and ordinary
\nnon-Catholics alike–is an inability to distinguish between degrees of
\nwrong, a refusal to acknowledge that sometimes there are lesser evils
\nthat must be endured in order to avoid greater evils. It just seems
\nmorally obtuse to oppose condom distribution as part of an
\nAIDS-suppression public health program. <\/p>\n

Some Defenders of the Faith are now making it clear that they are more
\ninterested in maintaining the position that condoms are an “intrinsic
\nevil” than in following their theologian-pope’s lead. For his part,
\nBenedict is sending a signal that, unlike his predecessor, he’s not
\ninterested in right-wing lock-downs of issues of pressing moral
\nconcern.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nCatholic Right Sheathed on Condoms - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-right-sheathed-on-condoms.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholic Right Sheathed on Condoms - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Heads are exploding all over the Catholic Right (boom, boom, and boom) not because Pope Benedict has altered official Catholic teaching on condoms. 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It’s because (as the estimable Austin Ivereigh makes clear) Pope Benedict has countermanded what the Catholic Right would have you believe is…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-right-sheathed-on-condoms.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-11-24T10:17:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/exploding%20heads.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Catholic Right Sheathed on Condoms - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-right-sheathed-on-condoms.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Catholic Right Sheathed on Condoms - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Heads are exploding all over the Catholic Right (boom, boom, and boom) not because Pope Benedict has altered official Catholic teaching on condoms. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}