In his opening address to the 5th General Conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops, Benedict XVI denounced capitalism and Marxism as well as liberation theology, which sees Christ as a social revolutionary, devoted to the marginalized and the poor, a devotion considered fundamental to the Christian message.
While admitting that just structures, featuring justice for the poor, are an indispensable condition for a just society, Benedict unequivocally declared that the "political task" of insuring those structures is not the Church's role. With nary a nod to the irony that he heads an institution with an army of paid lobbyists, he argued: "If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions." He even added: "Respect for a healthy secularity --including the pluralism of political options-- is essential in the authentic Christian tradition."
Wow. These are stunning contentions for someone who in that same speech --and the next day in a press conference-- vigorously and autocratically condemned laws permitting abortion and contraception as well as the lawmakers who support them. He maintained that in those cases, it is entirely appropriate for the Church to take a rigid political stand, and to literally banish from the institution politicians who disagree. On the heels of Mexico's decision to legalize abortion, Benedict issued an Inquisitional ultimatum, decreeing that pro-choice politicians excommunicate themselves from the Church. "Legislative action in favor of abortion is incompatible with participation in the Eucharist," he said. "The killing of an innocent human child is incompatible with going to communion in the body of Christ."
Actually, there are many ways to kill a human child. Days before Benedict's trip to Brazil, Save the Children released a report, State of the World's Mothers. That report noted that each day 28,000 children under the age of five --more than 10 million per year-- perish from preventable causes, the vast majority in the developing world. It also identified a primary antidote to those needless deaths: access to contraception.
The report notes that voluntary family planning not only prevents maternal deaths (which take half a million women's lives each year) by helping women delay risky early pregnancies, space births, and reduce HIV transmission. Family planning also increases the survival of babies. "Infants spaced more than three years apart are more that three times as likely to survive as infants born less than one to one-and-a-half years apart," reads the report. The correlation is unmistakable: Countries like Bangladesh that have dramatically improved access to birth control have also lowered rates of child death. By contrast, in Niger, where only 4 percent of women use modern contraception, one in every four children dies before her fifth birthday.
Moreover, it's clear that Benedict is promoting an insidious double standard in terms of the Church's political participation. One applies only to reproductive health issues and women, while the other applies to every other social issue on the Church's agenda, from poverty to preemptive war, nuclear proliferation to ethnic cleansing, prisoner torture to state-sponsored murder. But this isn't really new. What is new is that he is out there defending the separation of Church and state when it suits him. He is calling for "the need to find adequate answers in a rational manner" in order to arrive "at consensus" (more words about poverty from Brazil), while working through legions of Church representatives to defeat laws supporting sex education, birth control access, assisted reproduction, emergency contraception even for rape victims, and a woman's right to end a pregnancy she knows she cannot manage. And apparently hoping no one will notice.
By the looks of the uncritical media coverage of yet another Papal trip, apparently, few have.