Signs

of the Times

The papal book and clarification on the controversial AIDS remarks were no doubt intended to clarify something to put to rest controversy. They are doing and likely to do more controversy not less because it opens a pandoras box of controversy.

They invoke a lot of head-scratchery. Why now? The AIDS crisis has been with us for over twenty years, millions if not billions of dollars of AIDS funding has gone to research and prevention, entire departments of NIH, Health Departments across the world and the WHO-World Health Organization have had research departments, grant funding, and officers and staff looking at how we fight this global pandemic for decades. Every major university with a hospital has tried to find the medicinal cure.

Just now the Pope comes out with a book that agrees with something pretty much gospel across the medical community for decades. Putting on a condom is an act of responsibility and care for another person you are sexually linked to if you don't want to kill them. Condoms can prevent the spread of a fatal disease.

Here is what I don't get. Why did it take literally decades for church people to agree with something so obvious? Why did anyone in their right mind think that they needed to wait for the Pope to say anything about it when medical consensus has been clear for decades? Are there no priests who know anyone who reads medical journals or even the regular papers?

If the Pope came out and said "Galileo was a crack-pot and the World really has been all along flat" would that require everyone to agree?
Recall what they did to Galileo- didn't they excommunicate him? (later they buried him in one of my favorite churches in Florence Italy.)

The Curia, or Council of Cardinals are a bunch of old guys. That's what they are- approaching or exceeding for the most part 70 years in age. Age does not necessarily bring wisdom. Sometimes it brings cataracts, arteriosclerosis and a touch of senility. Sometimes they move so slow you are looking for the walkers under their vestments. Why on earth would you wait two decades for anything to be proclaimed acceptable by them? That's an entire generation - you could lose an entire generation just waiting.