Cdl. Martini, Gay Marriage, Vagina Monologues, and Xoff's Biology

As mentioned earlier in this blog, Cdl. Martini (Friend of Rembert) wandered off the Catholic reservation with remarks on rubbers, AIDS, and abortion. Too bad, but not entirely unexpected; Martini's been nibbling at the edges of The Apple for years.

Magister reports completely, as we have come to expect.

Some key text (and yes, we'll get to Xoff's Incredible Biology, too...)

“So now the Trojan horse has been brought into the city,” says one of the top figures of the congregation, with “L’espresso” open on the table. “At first glance, some of cardinal Martini’s expressions of openness seem good and worthy of endorsing. But they conceal devastating effects.”

“The condom is a false solution,” continues the official of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. “In the ABC’s of the battle against AIDS – Abstinence, Be faithful, Condom – the first two of these, chastity and marital fidelity, are valid for the Church. But not the third.

“All you have to do is read the Catechism of the Catholic Church to identify the firm points from which Martini departs,” says the official of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. One of these first points is complete respect for every human life “from conception,” from its very first moments.

That SHOULD ring a bell with Xoff, who states he went to a Catholic high school.

The final document said that “the moment that marks the beginning of the existence of a new human being is represented by the penetration of the spermatozoon into the oocyte.” Benedict XVI visited the congress participants, and told them that “the love of God does not distinguish between the newly conceived child still in his mother’s womb and the baby, or the young person, or the mature or elderly person. He does not distinguish, because in each one of them he sees the imprint of his own image and likeness.

The fact that cardinal Martini ignored all of this in “L’espresso,” and even cleared the way for the use of the oocyte in the first hours after fertilization, maintaining that here “no sign of an individually distinguishable life yet appears,” was seen as an act of surrender to what John Paul II defined as the modern “culture of death.”

Furthermore, Sgreccia [President, Academy for Life and top Vatican bioethicist] reminded Martini that “his theory” on the fertilized oocyte “is not shared by many embryologists.” And in effect, when the National Committee on Bioethics in Italy examined this issue in July of 2005, it was split 26 against 12. With the majority were Sgreccia and other Catholic and secular scholars, all in favor of the inviolability of the fertilized egg from the very first moment. With the minority was Carlo Flamigni, who wanted to add to the final document his own very polemical comments on the Church. The position of this minority is the one that both cardinal Martini and professor Marino expressed in their dialogue in “L’espresso.”

Which is to say that Xoff is not only wrong on Catholicism--he's likely wrong on the biology; a point we made.

And it's not just Catholic "bible-thumpers" who think Martini's lost his way:

There is an editorialist for “Avvenire,” for example, Lucetta Scaraffia, an historian and feminist who has followed bioethics for years: she charges Martini with addressing problems of life and death that are central in our time “with the reductionist and casuist mode of reasoning that has represented the negative stereotype of the Jesuits since Pascal’s time.”

Which reductionism, we might add, is the foundation of the play "The Vagina Monologues," and other strange perversions--such as the fiction of "gay marriage."

And we haven't even gotten to the stubborn fact that a condom is physically incapable of stopping a virus, folks.