Benedict XVI: From Rottweiler to dunce?

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

A few days after the election of Pope Benedict XVI, some friends and I gathered for a celebratory dinner at Rome's Taverna Giulia - a favorite haunt of journalists, due in part to the fact that it serves the best lasagnette col pesto on the planet.

I arrived a bit early and, as I walked through the restaurant, I spied the leadership of the National Catholic Reporter, including publisher Sr. Rita Larivee, editor Tom Roberts, and the NCR's ace Vatican reporter, John Allen, with whom I had been swapping stories and rumors for years.

Being in a somewhat ebullient mood, I went over to the NCR table and invited them to "join the victory party" upstairs. They had the good taste to laugh, although it was clear that some of their company were not altogether thrilled by the conclave's outcome. Would a papal bull condemning the NCR and all its works soon be forthcoming from the Apostolic Palace?

I doubt that my NCR friends imagined that, a mere 16 months later, they would run an editorial positively chortling over what they assumed to be my discomfiture, and that of my colleagues among the dread neocons/theocons, over the course of the pontificate to date.

There was, of course, no more evidence for this than there was for latent fears, on that lovely Roman evening in April 2005, of a new Benedictine inquisition. But, then, journalism is not an exact science, and editorializing is the least exact part of journalism.

God's dunce?

Further evidence of which was provided by yet another NCR editorial, in the paper's October 13 issue, which seemed to argue that the man so many on the Catholic Left had long taken to be "God's rottweiler" had suddenly become God's dunce.

In his recent Regensburg lecture, the editorial suggested, Pope Benedict XVI may have trafficked a bit "too much in theological abstraction," while failing to weigh sufficiently "the complicated historical, political, and social factors" bearing on the Islamic world's (admittedly "dismal") record on religious freedom.

"Focusing exclusively on theological difference between Christianity and Islam - whether real or imagined - therefore runs the risk of oversimplifying a complex situation," the editors warned.

Listening tour?

So what should Benedict XVI do? Appoint a group of retired and semi-retired cardinals - men who "understand the complex argot of politics and international diplomacy" - as roving ambassadors to the worlds within worlds of Islam.

Which would seem to suggest that the 264th successor to St. Peter doesn't know how to talk the talk, much less walk the walk. From rottweiler to dunce in two months: fast work, indeed.

And completely preposterous. In the weeks immediately following the Regensburg lecture, Iranian television described Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest as a tool of the "Zionist lobby" and "capitalist weapons companies," and informed its audience that Pepsi is a devious acronym standing for "Pay Each Penny Save Israel."

At about the same time, the interior minister of Saudi Arabia, Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-'Aziz, urged an audience to "cut off the tongues" of the "transgressors," i.e., Muslims "who are trying to distort Islam with their claims of reform and their corrupt progress." In the same speech, broadcast on Al-Majd TV, Prince Nayef also claimed that Osama bin Laden is "an agent of foreign intelligence agencies."

What, do you suppose, will a roving band of aged cardinals sent on what the NCR proposes as a "listening tour" of Muslim states learn from all that - or from Iranian president Ahmadinejad's claim that Iran today is "a perfect model of splendid, humane, and divine life"?

Language of rationality

At Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI did the world an immense service by giving believers and non-believers alike a language with which to deal with the threat of jihadist ideology: the language of rationality and irrationality.

Far from being an exercise in "theological abstraction," the Holy Father's Regensburg lecture was a courageous attempt to create a new public grammar capable of disciplining and directing the world's discussion of what is arguably the world's gravest problem.

It's a shame the NCR missed that. Let's hope the Congress we elect this week doesn't.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Sex selection:
Questionable even with moral means

		A Culture of Life  Professor  Janet E. Smith

Few people are aware how common is the practice of attempting to select the sex of one's child.

Parents may want to prevent the transmission of a genetic disease; they may want a male child to carry on the family name or to meet the requirements of their religion, or to achieve some balance within the family.

Nearly all of the methods for doing sex selection involve immoral practices: infanticide, a common practice in some countries, such as China; selective abortion or killing of the baby of the "wrong sex" within the womb; creating many embryos and implanting only those of the desired sex; and "sperm sorting" which also involves artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Natural methods?

If sex selection could be done naturally, that is, not involving any of the reproductive technologies that involve killing embryonic or fetal human beings, or harming children, the Church would not consider it to be intrinsically evil.

That is, there could be good reasons for seeking a child of one sex or another, as long as the parents accept whatever child they conceive as an inestimable gift from God.

That is, parents who have a number of children of one sex may try then to have one or several of the other.

Practitioners of Natural Family Planning (NFP) have various as of yet unverified theories on how to time intercourse to increase the possibility of conceiving the desired sex.

Sexual demographics

Still, were such natural methods available, we, as a society, may wish to forego them for prudential reasons. For what might be moral for the individual has serious repercussions for sexual demographics.

Let me explain. Nature seems to produce about 105 males for every 100 females. This natural imbalance evens out when a cohort reaches marriage age because more boys tend to die from reckless behavior, disease, etc.

The practice of sex selection has greatly disturbed that balance. Nearly 90 per cent of the sex selection that is done worldwide aims at producing male children.

There are reports that in some hospitals in India, 90 percent of the babies aborted are female. Some countries have a gross imbalance between males and females - as high as 120 males for every 100 females.

Without the domesticating possibility of marriage, these cultures may be facing greatly increased crime rates, greater incidence of prostitution, and problems with addiction among males who will never marry.

Pandora's box

While most bioethicists and professional organizations speak disapprovingly of sex selection, there has been little public discussion of the issue.

Here is another issue that can be traced back to abortion. Pro-abortion feminists who should be raising a clarion call of outrage are willing to accept the slaughter of unborn females in preference to male babies because they fear any restriction on sex selection since restriction of any abortion threatens all abortions.

The logic is on the side of the pro-abortion crowd - if it is all right for a woman to kill her baby through abortion for any reason whatsoever, why would it be wrong for her to kill her girl babies if she, her husband, or her culture prefers a boy?

Legalized abortion has unleashed a Pandora's box of evils and until we make it illegal, its pernicious effects will continue to proliferate.

Professor Janet E. Smith is the Fr. Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Mich. This column is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com, and licensed from J. Smith.