I was surprised to find, in fiddling around with a pope-picking thingie, that only six of the 115 cardinals are against contraception in all circumstances. The other 109 would allow it to prevent the spread of disease.
Now, I’ve never actually looked at the cardinal level to know if this is new, having so many cardinals think contraception is okay to prevent disease, or if that’s the way it’s been for a while. Are you surprised?
Nothing else surprised me. The vast majority are old, conservative to ultra-conservative, and pretty boring.
I think the opposition is to contraceptives-as-birth-control. How many of those cardinals oppose the wide availability of contraceptives? Certainly more than six.
ETA: It turns out the pope picker thingy doesn’t even allow that option.
They all oppose contraceptives as contraceptives. But the church public stance has been that condoms are bad, no matter what.
ETA: Actually, I had forgotten to refresh my memory. Benedict DID say that condoms could be okay to prevent disease. I was surprised by the cardinals because I didn’t do my due diligence!
The Catholic Church has long opposed condom use to stop disease, and has lied about condoms in places like Africa in order to convince people not to use them. And killing an unknown number of people as a result of that, inevitably.
This couldn’t have gone in one of the other pope threads?
Anyway, this is nothing new. All they are saying is that if you have to choose between the two, sometimes condoms are the lesser of two evils. Even the last pope was Ok with that.
Don’t be mistaken. The RCC is against birth control. That is not going to change with the next pope.
OK…who else doesn’t feel entirely certain that Rainer Maria Woelki could pass the pierced chair test?
Oh, contraception. No, I’m not surprised. They are all, as far as we can tell from that quiz anyhow, opposed to contraception 100% of the time. 109 of them are in favor of using condoms for disease prevention. Still not in favor of using them for contraception.
I like the Filipino (plus it’s about time we got someone from outside Europe again), but if it ends up being André Armand Vingt-Trois he should keep his own name: it comes with its own numeral!
Seeing one of them there’s something I think is missing: “has been known to jump with both feet into issues which are very much not in the Church’s domain”, such as the administrative organization of a country.
What I don’t understand is why in the world is one guy feeling your testicles somehow preferable to the same guy looking at them to make sure you have them?
Cool website. But really, Guardian? You can put an accent over “Seán”, but you can’t spell “O’Malley” correctly? And “O’Brien”?
Polycarp Pengo is an awesome name,
The new name Francis is a tiny bit shocking, but it beats people trying to pronounce his real name, “ber-gog-lee-oh? ber-go-glee-oh?” Is Sandri really that much more conservative than him, though? Besides Bergoglio being a damned hippie Jesuit, of course.
