Minds formed by the BBC...

[fpb]

...have no trouble celebrating Christmas by misrepresenting the Pope's words, using him as an ideological target for their sexual obsessions, and on top of it having the miserable nerve of claiming that it is he, rather than they, who represent hate, fear and intolerance. Well done, Grauniad and companions; I am sure that the ghosts of Hume, Cromwell and Henry VIII are clapping their hands in Hell. This is a sorry statement to make on Christmas Eve, but we are not commanded to lie politely about enemies.

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[fpb.livejournal.com]

He said that there is an internal ecology in man which is just as necessary as the preservation of the external world. The abuse and sterilization of the sexual drive were one of the ways in which this internal balance could be ruined. The media, who evidently are incapable of understanding anything except buggery, translated this to mean that homosexuality was as bad as destroying the planet. And upon this piece of highly interpretative communication a shout of rage went up from all the commonplace minds and all the practitioners of pre-programmed righteous indignation. As a matter of fact, the Holy Father did not mention homosexuality, let alone gay sex, once, in his whole speech, either by name or by suggestion; what he spoke of was what Catholic teaching calls fornication.

Incidentally, as an Irishman, you may be interested to know that one of Irish Christianity's most important contributions to the Catholic Church were the penitentials, descriptions of the appropriate sanction that a confessor should impose for each sin and each kind of sinners. These actually seem to be a common invention of the British Isles - three of the most ancient bear the names of the two most important British saints, David and Gildas, and of a British "Synod of Lucus Victoriae" - but they reached the rest of Christendom via the Irish missionaries, especially St.Columbanus. Before the invention of penitentials, and in spite of the influence of Roman law upon the Church, nobody had ever thought of a rule of punishment for confessed sins. Now: I say this because in all the early penitentials, homosexual fornication is treated exactly the same as heterosexual fornication. The early British and Irish monks, who were shrewd and practical people with plenty of insight into sin, did not see anything especially abominable or destructive about homosexual sex as compared with illicit heterosexual sex. The special hate of homosexual sex comes from the revision of Roman law carried out by that monster and mass murderer, Justinian I, who decreed the death penalty for anal coition; and Justinian, the destroyer of Roman civilization, was not a man whom our biblical obsessives ought to regard as the rule of Christian morality.