Annie Lennox opened the Edinburgh Festival of Politics yesterday with a stinging attack on the Pope’s approach to HIV/Aids prevention in Africa.
She said that the Pope’s denunciation of condoms on his recent tour of Africa had caused “tremendous harm” and criticised the Roman Catholic Church for causing widespread confusion on the continent.
She also condemned the media’s obessesion with “celebrity culture” for keeping the Aids pandemic off the front page.
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While this is the standard left-wing spin of the papal document, as exemplified by AP and Reuters' coverage of it, the Democratic politician omitted that these three issues she names are secondary to the link that Benedict XVI made between “life ethics and social ethics, fully aware that ‘a society lacks solid foundations when, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, but then, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of ways in which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized.” The pope would go on to condemn “the tragic and widespread scourge of abortion...the systematic eugenic programming of births....[and] practices... [which] foster a materialistic and mechanistic understanding of human life.”
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“Lately, I’ve noticed that other bishops are coming to this position,” [Archbishop Raymond] Burke told Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian bishops’ conference.
