Are They Listening?

◆ The recently released Vatican document reasserting bans on birth control, premarital intercourse, masturbation and homosexuality (with some reservations) has created a worldwide storm of Catholic protest and reemphasized many disagreements within the Church:

● French priest and author Marc Oraison said: “I think the majority of Catholics won’t be very impressed by this document.”

● John Deedy, managing editor of the Catholic journal Commonweal, writes that “the Vatican has furnished Catholics with a theology of sex that is often more easily lampooned than it is subscribed to and lived by.”

● U.S. priest and columnist Andrew Greeley called attention to another contradiction: On one side of Rome’s street, Via Aurelia, “is the wall of Vatican City and the palace of the Holy Office.” But “on the other side of the Via Aurelia is a ‘pharmacia’ whose outside wall is graced by a vending machine for contraceptives.” Priest Greeley wonders “whether the people who wrote [the document] . . . really think there is an audience out there still listening to them.”