TFTD: Male Bovine Excrement

"All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again."

--Battlestar Galactica.

Pope Francis gave an interview which was published today. The gist of the mainstream media coverage was that the Pope was indifferent to moral issues such as homosexuality, abortion and contraception.

The mainstream media coverage is a bunch of male bovine excrement of course,  but what irritates me is the coverage of certain conservative Catholic blogs. The reason it annoys me is because these conservative bloggers would in any other case challenge the media claims. Here many accept the media claims, assuming the Pope was speaking in a fuzzy manner allowing unclear language to confuse the message.

I believe this is also male bovine excrement.

This is not the first time this happened. A few years back, Pope Benedict XVI gave a book interview with Peter Seewald... which I blogged about HERE. The mainstream media took an excerpt from L'Osservatore Romano and proclaimed that the Pope was changing Church teaching on condoms.

He wasn't. He was giving a hypothetical example of a person beginning to think of moral consequences. He reiterated he held the Catholic position. But that was ignored by the media.

Then too, conservative Catholic bloggers took the media at their word. The editor of L'OR was bashed. The Vatican Press Office was bashed. The Pope was... gently criticized for being imprecise.

This is more of the same. The media grossly took out of context what was said...and conservative Catholic bloggers assumed the Pope was speaking in a fuzzy and vague manner.

He wasn't. What we are seeing is a Pope who is deeply in love with Christ and the Church established by Christ. He wants to show that Christ's love and forgiveness is available to all. He doesn't deny the Catholic moral teaching.  But he does want the whole teaching to be taught.  Not just that homosexual acts and abortion are evil, but that the sinner is loved by God.

If we leave that out, we forget a crucial message of Christianity. God sent His Son for our salvation. We need to keep this in mind or we will miss the point of why we preach the Gospel.

I think what pisses me off the most about this is the way certain bloggers have made a beautiful explanation of the faith appear to be fuzzy thinking. They undermine the confidence in the Pope when they should be challenging the mainstream media.