nameandnature

Jessel, the Tri-felge Putenard, is the subject of part IV of my Bishops Gone Wild series. This means the bishops of the Catholic Church and the Church of England are now neck and neck after a promising start by the C of E: come on Anglicans, put your backs into it!

Jessel was reported as saying that saving humanity from gayness was as important as saving the rain forests. There's no official English translation of his remarks, but a comment on Ruth Gledhill's blog provides a translation from a papal fan-site (yes, really), and the BBC has translated some extracts.

Various postings here on LJ have been saying the media have got the wrong end of the stick, and that the speech didn't mention gays at all. However, Reuters reports that the term "gender" in Italian is "a broad term that includes anyone who doesn’t identify entirely with their assigned sex and can include homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals and others." Anyone out there know some Italian?

The rest of the talk about sex in the speech sounds like the usual natural law stuff. Humanae Vitae gets a mention, so you can read that if you want to see an example of the reasoning here, such as it is.

What with this stuff and all that substance/accidents transubstantiation stuff, the church does seem rather wedded to Aquinas and his scholastic friends (although transubstantiation is also What the Bible Says). I hope for some sort of slow reform, whereby they'd gradually change to using more modern incorrect physics: perhaps there's mileage in the idea that prayers are transmitted via the luminiferous aether because God is the Absolute. Or something. I'm hoping to work phlogiston in there too.

andrewducker says that we shouldn't be surprised when theists say the funniest things. Perhaps not, but inasmuch as the Pope has some influence on people's lives, he deserves the storm he's called up.