Pope under-fire for 'negative' statements !!

No, Not RP, but the one from Rome.............

Pope Benedict XVI has come under fire from a leading Vatican watcher as "The Pope who says No" following a series of "negative" Vatican statements on homosexuality, the disabled and bio-ethics.

On Friday the Vatican made its most authoritative statement on bio-ethics for twenty years, condemning artificial fertilization, human cloning, "designer babies" and embryonic stem-cell research. The document, "Dignitas Personae" (Dignity of the Person) was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which the Pope headed as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before his election as pontiff.

The document also condemned the "morning-after pill" and the drug RU-486, which blocks the action of hormones needed to keep a fertilized egg implanted in the uterus. It said such drugs, as well as the IUD (intrauterine device), fell "within the sin of abortion" and were "gravely immoral".

Marco Politi, the veteran Vatican correspondent of La Repubblica, said this was "yet another papal no" after Vatican opposition to UN declarations on the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the rights of the disabled, on the grounds that they could be seen a sanctioning gay marriage and abortion.

Mr Politi, the author with Carl Bernstein of "His Holiness", a study of Pope John Paul II and the fall of Communism, said the Vatican risked appearing to put the stress on a rigid observance of doctrine ahead of human dilemmas, suffering and distress.

The only "reforms" carried out in the past three years, Mr Politi said, were the revival of the Latin mass and the provision of new and "more miliaristic" uniforms for the Vatican gendarmerie. It was not question of Catholic doctrine, which remained the same under Pope Benedict as it had under John Paul II. The problem was rather Benedict's "insufficient capacity for speaking to the world" in the way John Paul had done.

The Times..