June 2009 Print

The Apostolic Voyage of the Pope in Africa (March 17-23, 2009); the Press Conference in the Airplane

The press published only this carefully isolated statement from the Pope’s answer to a French journalist’s question about AIDS: “The problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms: on the contrary, they increase it.” Here is the complete transcription of the question and the answer:

Philippe Visseyrias from France 2: “Your Holiness, among the many ills that beset Africa, one of the most pressing is the spread of Aids. The position of the Catholic Church on the way to fight it is often considered unrealistic and ineffective. Will you address this theme during the journey?”

Benedict XVI: “I would say the opposite. I think that the most efficient, most truly present player in the fight against Aids is the Catholic Church herself, with her movements and her various organizations. I think of the Sant’Egidio community that does so much, visibly and also behind the scenes, in the struggle against Aids, I think of the Camillians, and so much more besides, I think of all the Sisters who take care of the sick. I would say that this problem of Aids cannot be overcome merely with money, necessary though it is. If there is no human dimension, if Africans do not help [by responsible behaviour], the problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics: on the contrary, they increase it. The solution must have two elements: firstly, bringing out the human dimension of sexuality, that is to say a spiritual and human renewal that would bring with it a new way of behaving towards others, and secondly, true friendship offered above all to those who are suffering, a willingness to make sacrifices and to practice self-denial, to be alongside the suffering. And so these are the factors that help and that lead to real progress: our twofold effort to renew humanity inwardly, to give spiritual and human strength for proper conduct towards our bodies and those of others, and this capacity to suffer with those who are suffering, to remain present in situations of trial. It seems to me that this is the proper response, and the Church does this, thereby offering an enormous and important contribution. We thank all who do so.”

In its official transcription, the Vatican press bureau nuanced the Pope’s words: “I would say that this problem of Aids cannot be overcome merely with advertising slogans. If there is no human dimension, if Africans do not help [by responsible behaviour], the problem cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics: on the contrary, they increase it.”

(DICI 4/11)

The Media Lynch Mob

At Paris, Berlin, London, and Brussels, there was but one and the same virulent outcry. “France expresses her deep concern over the consequences of these statements of Benedict XVI,” the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eric Chevallier, declared to the press. “While it is not up to us to pass judgment on the doctrine of the Church, we consider that these statements endanger public health policies and the imperative to protect human life,” he said.

German political figures also spoke out. Ulla Schmidt, the federal minister of health and social security, and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the federal minster of economic cooperation and development, contradicted the Pope’s words without naming him expressly: “Cooperation in modern development ought to give the poorest of the poor access to family-planning methods, and, in this context, the use of condoms. Anything else would be irresponsible,” they declared. Other politicians, like the leader of the European Greens group in the European elections, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or the former French Minster Alain Juppé (UMP), deplored the Pope’s position. Juppé opined on the airwaves of France Culture: “This Pope is getting to be a real problem” since he lives in “a totally autistic state.”

In the United Kingdom, Judith Melby, a specialist on Africa for the organization Christian Aid, a joint work of some forty Protestant denominations in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, thought that “the pope’s comments are not very helpful. It’s sending a confusing message to Africa, in those countries where the Catholic church is very important.”

In Belgium, the Minister for International Cooperation and Development, Charles Michel, of the Reform movement, characterized the Pope’s words as “hallucinatory, scandalous, and even irresponsible.” On April 2, the Chamber of Deputies adopted a resolution (95 votes for, 18 against, and 7 abstentions) “demanding that the Belgian government condemn the unacceptable words spoken by the Pope during his voyage in Africa and lodge an official protest with the Holy See,” according to the Belga press bureau. Even if the deputies declined to demand the temporary recall of the Belgian ambassador to the Vatican and the convocation of the Apostolic Nuncio to Brussels, Belgium became “the first country to lodge an official protest,” boasted Denis Ducarme, the liberal deputy who instigated this resolution.

The next day, the Belgian bishops timidly “regretted” the Belgian Parliament’s statement: “We take notice of the vote by the Chamber of Representatives declaring the Pope’s declarations concerning the fight against Aids as ‘unacceptable.’ We respect the democratic character of this decision, but we regret its tenor.” This resolution, which asked the Belgian government to lodge a protest by official, diplomatic channel with the Vatican, does not take into account what Benedict XVI really intended to express: without an education in sexual responsibility, the other means of prevention will remain deficient, they asserted in their communiqué, which is everything but an energetic protest.

In France, “irresponsible” was the word echoed, on March 20, by three Masonic obediences: the Grand Orient of France, the Women’s Grand Lodge of France, and the Federation for Human Rights, expressing “their stupefaction and indignation at the irresponsible remarks of Pope Benedict XVI” against the usage of the condom as a means of preventing AIDS. They wondered about “the present state of mind of the current Vatican hierarchy” after the affairs of the holocaust-denying integrist bishop and the excommunication of the mother and doctors of the Brazilian girl who had an abortion. “Such a denial of scientific evidence in the name of the doctrine of the Church becomes intolerable when the consequence is the jeopardizing of people’s lives, and the signatory obediences ally themselves with the protests filed by the French government on this subject,” they added, not without mentioning their “inviolable attachment to the principle of the lay State guaranteeing full freedom of conscience for all citizens.”

As is now usual, a poll was taken to assess the effects of this media campaign on public opinion. So it was that an Ifop poll for the Journal du Dimanche showed 43% of French Catholics to be in favor of Benedict XVI’s departure [from the papacy], with 54% against, and 3% having no opinion. The proportion of French Catholics in favor of Benedict XVI’s departure increased to 47% among non-practicing Catholics, but dropped to 31% among practicing Catholics. After such an onslaught, the contrary would have been surprising. Moreover, when asked whether the Catholic Church ought to “modify its teaching and its positions to take into consideration the changes that have occurred in society and mores,” a very large majority of French Catholics responded affirmatively, especially as regards contraception.

In keeping with the journalists, politicians, and Masonic obediences, the British medical journal Lancet reproached the Pope for his ignorance on the subject of the debates about prophylactics. Benedict XVI “publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue,” declared a journalist of the BBC on March 27, quoting The Lancet, for which the use of condoms constitutes the single, most effective way to limit the sexual transmission of AIDS. According to the BBC, the medical journal is calling upon the Vatican to retract its statement: “When any influential person, be it a religious or political figure, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record.”

Such is not the opinion of an American scientist, Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, quoted by National Review, who bluntly stated: “We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working.” He stressed that “The pope is correct, or, put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. Condoms have been proven to not be effective at the level of population.”

(DICI 4/11)

The African Situation First Hand

Msgr. Hugh Slattery, the bishop of Tzaneen, in South Africa, produced a film documentary called Sowing in Tears in collaboration with the producer Norman Servais, about the AIDS epidemic in his country. The film won the Grand Prix at the 22nd International Catholic Film and Multimedia Festival held in Niepokalanow, Poland, in 2007. He explained that “despite the promotion of condoms in schools, there is a high rate of pregnancy among schoolgirls, sometimes as high as 20%.” He revealed that the economic advantages of such a situation are real, since the manufacture of condoms is a multimillion-dollar business.

“South Africa and the neighboring countries of Botswana and Swaziland have the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection in the world and also the highest rate of condom distribution. The conclusion is inescapable that more condoms mean more cases of AIDS and more deaths. It is, of course, ‘politically incorrect’ both here and in the Western world to even hint at the possibility that condoms may in fact be fueling the spread of this deadly disease rather than curbing it.” The Church’s goal in the country is “to lift the veil of secrecy and denial around HIV/AIDS and get people to talk about it openly….People are totally brainwashed into believing that in fact there is no real crisis. They see that a lot of the younger generation are dying but are told that people get AIDS because they don’t use the condom correctly to have ‘safe sex.’ Behind this is the widespread belief that people who die of AIDS have been bewitched.”

“Uganda was the first country to really take a strong stand against the AIDS pandemic from the early ’90’s. The strong and clear leadership of President Museveni was the decisive element in bringing down the spread of HIV/AIDS from over 25% to 6% by 2002. He preached ‘common sense’ and not ‘condom sense’ as he mobilized his country in promoting abstinence before marriage and fidelity in marriage as cultural values.”

(DICI 4/11)

Support for the Pope

Interviewed by the French television network KTO and I.Media on March 18, several African prelates expressed their approval of Benedict XVI’s statements in the airplane that took him to Yaoundé. “I call upon Westerners not to impose their unique way of seeing things on us,” Senegalese Cardinal Theodore-Adrien Sarr, Archbishop of Dakar, declared. “In countries like ours,” he explained, “abstinence and fidelity are still values that we live by, and by promoting them we contribute to the prevention of AIDS.” “We cannot advocate the use of condoms,” he insisted, “but we can teach the moral values that are still in honor with us, in order to help our populations protect themselves against AIDS: abstinence and fidelity.” These values are “realities” for Africans, “and no one should be telling us that we should not be preaching these values.”

In the same vein, Msgr. Simon Ntamwana, Archbishop of Gitega in Burundi, denounced the West’s “change of mind” and its “sexual hedonism, which is perceived as inescapable.” “It isn’t the condom,” he asserted, “that is going to reduce the number of cases of AIDS, but rather the discipline that everyone must impose upon himself in order to change his attitude, an attitude that will help him to escape his uncontrollable hedonism.” “You are abdicating your will and your responsibility, and I don’t know where you are headed,” the Burundi bishop said for the benefit of Westerners.

On the front-page of L’Osservatore Romano’s March 22 edition, an editorialist supported Benedict XVI’s statements on the fight against AIDS. The condom is defended [by politicians and the Western media–Ed.],” the writer explained, “because it allows modern society to continue to believe in itself and its principles, and because it seems to re-establish control of the situation without changing anything.” “The Pope’s words were so keenly criticized because they struck a nerve, an ideological lie.”

In France, while the Bishop of Gap, Msgr. Jean-Michel di Falco, acknowledged in Le Parisien having recommended the use of condoms against AIDS, Msgr. Marc Aillet, Bishop of Bayonne, declared on March 25:

“The journalists, some of whom belong to the so-called Catholic press, have once again hit upon a line, and the politicians, often slaves of opinion, have unthinkingly taken it a step further and denounced the ‘unacceptable remarks’ of the Holy Father and the ‘irresponsible teaching of the Church.’ Sons and daughters of the Church, we can hold our heads high because the Pope’s statements have been confirmed by the African bishops and by the heads of state of those countries ravaged by AIDS, denouncing the ‘latent racism’ of the Westerners who would like to impose their deadly remedies in the name of their sacrosanct sexual license or their mercantilist materialism, from which we clearly see who profits. His speech was not contrary to the facts: according to the statistics of the WHO, in the African countries where the rate of condom distribution is highest, the advance of AIDS is highest; and where the Catholics are most numerous, and abstinence and fidelity are preached as the first remedy, even by government programs, and the condom as a last resort, AIDS is markedly reduced, as in Burundi and Angola.”

On Sunday, March 29, 2009, in St. Peter’s Square, the African students of Rome convened a demonstration of solidarity with the Pope during the Angelus. In a press release, they declared that the purpose of the manifestation was “to cry out” their opposition to “the speculations over Africa,” “to the political distortion of the Pope’s message for Africa,” and “to those who want to make Africa one of the main markets and outlets of condoms.” They equally intended to show their support for “effective care for AIDS in Africa” and “education,” and to thank the Pope for his “lucid and detailed social, cultural, spiritual, environmental and economic diagnosis” of the African continent, and for “the different solutions and paths” he pointed out so that “Africans themselves might be the artificers and protagonists of their own development.”

The fact that France had particularly distinguished itself in the media lynching of Benedict XVI did not escape the notice of Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops. Thus we read in its columns of March 26th: “In Paris, they continue to cultivate the ambition of giving lessons to the Pope, to this Pope who, in the name of Christ and with the arguments of reason, dared to speak to the populations of Cameroon and Angola, and through them to all Africans, as adult populations that must know how to raise their heads and their voices.” The Pope “warned that AIDS cannot be limited by nor vanquished with prophylactics, but with humanly responsible lifestyles and with effective medicines made available to the poor free of charge,” the Catholic daily commented. “It was this assertion that seemed scandalous, especially on French soil, to the ears of the ministers and governmental spokespersons,” they observed. “They thunder in the newspapers, the microphones and radios, before the TV cameras,” and “they consult the experts of pharmaceutical companies and these benefactors of humanity who are the condom manufacturers.” For those who are “on the other side of the Alps (and the Rhine, and the Channel, and the Ocean), the affirmation of a fantastic principle seems to prevail first and foremost: the condom is the liberator and savior,” ironically concluded Avvenire.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India released a communiqué on March 24 in which it considered “as most irresponsible and irreverent” these kinds of statements against the head of the Catholic Church. The bishops defended the Pope, “the most loved and respected spiritual leader of the Catholics all over the world.” In fact, the Indian media asserted that the Pope “was entirely on the side of the real world” in the fight against AIDS, and for the most part criticized their foreign counterparts, in particular the American review Foreign Policy, which had ranked the Pope second on its list of “the thirteen worst people on the planet,” between the Austrian Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned and raped his daughter for 24 years, and the American Bernard Madoff, the perpetrator of a huge financial swindle.

For their part, the bishops of Cameroon declared: “The Western media have clearly forgotten other essential aspects of the Holy Father’s African message on poverty, reconciliation, justice and peace.” In a communiqué quoted by Radio Vatican on March 25, they judged as very serious the attitude of some of the mass media. “If the Western media have not understood the import of Benedict XVI’s voyage in Africa, Cameroonians have understood it very well” and “they welcomed the Pope with joy and enthusiasm.”

(DICI 4/11)

France: By Their Own Admission...

On the blog of La Croix (a French Roman Catholic daily newspaper of liberal tendency) on March 12, Nicolas Senèze returned to Bishop Fellay’s Press Release of March 12, and made a sizeable admission: “‘The Church is going through a major crisis which can be resolved only by an integral return to the purity of the Faith,’ Bishop Fellay stated in the Press Release which followed the publication of the letter by Benedict XVI. It could not be said more clearly that the Society of St. Pius X still does not intend to accept fully the teaching of the Council.”—It could not be pointed out more clearly that the full acceptance of the teaching of the Council is, in the eyes of the journalist of La Croix, hardly compatible with an integral return to the purity of the faith.

(Dici 27/3/2009)

Italian Archbishop Suspends Communion in the Hand to Avoid Abuses of the Eucharist 

Rome, Italy, May 11, 2009 / 11:45pm (CNA)–The Archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, has prohibited the reception of Communion in the hand in three parishes of his archdiocese and has asked priests to be on the watch for those who may be abusing the Eucharist.

The archdiocesan press office released a statement with the new guidelines established by the cardinal. It pointed out that in 1989, “the resolution of the Italian Bishops’ Conference came into effect, authorizing, with the approval of the Holy See, the distribution of Holy Communion in the hand.”

However, the statement noted, recently there have been reports that this privilege has been gravely abused. Consequently, Cardinal Caffarra has decided that at the Cathedral of St. Peter, at the Basilica of St. Petronius, and at the Shrine of the Virgin of St. Luke, “Communion shall be distributed to the faithful only on the tongue.”

According to a letter by the vicar general of Bologna, Msgr. Gabriele Cavina, “grave abuses” have taken place, as “some have taken the Sacred Species as ‘souvenirs’,” “put it up for sale,” or worse, “have taken it to be profaned in satanic rites.”

The priest explained that numerous cases of profanation of the Eucharist have been perpetrated by individuals who have taken advantage of the option to receive Communion in the hand, especially during large celebrations or at churches attended by large numbers of the faithful. “For this reason, it is best to control the moment of the reception of Holy Communion by following the common norms which are well known.”

Cardinal Caffarra said that during Mass, ushers should ensure that each person who approaches the altar to receive Communion “consumes the host immediately and that no one be allowed to walk away with the Eucharist in their hands or to place it in their pockets.”

(Catholic News Agency

)

Mass Booklets Available

DICI has made available a number of booklets in PDF format for following the traditional Mass. They consist of the ordinary of the Mass and are available in several languages, including English. See www.dici.org for details.

 

Archbishop Zollitsch Proclaims a Doctrinal Error; SSPX Calls for an Official Retraction

On Holy Saturday, the Chairman of the German Bishops‘ Conference, Robert Zollitsch, denied the expiatory death of Christ on the TV show Horizonte (April 11, 2009). For him, Christ had simply expressed “solidarity” with the suffering of the people even to death.

His statement prompted the interviewer’s question: “You would now no longer describe it in such a way that God gave His own Son because we humans were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?”

Archbishop Zollitsch confirmed with a clear no: God gave “His own son in solidarity with us unto this last death agony” to show us that “you are worth so much to me that I go with you, and I am totally with you in every situation.”

The Archbishop of Freiburg also said that one’s own sins were the reason why Christ “became so involved with me.”

“He has become involved with me out of solidarity–from free will.”

Against this shallow view that transforms the expiatory sacrifice of Christ into a psychological act of support, there is plenty of evidence in Holy Scripture. Here are some of them:

Rom. 5:10: “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son; much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”

I Pet. 2:24: “Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed.”

Is. 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

Mt. 26:28: “For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.”

(Homepage of the German SSPX District, 4/28/2009)