JP2's complicity in mass extermination?

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 11, 2004

This Sunday's New York Times carries an exceptionally brainless op-ed on this papacy and the next, penned by Roberto Pazzi, an Italian fantasist and artiste with an attitude.

Perhaps, as someone who has devoted two novels to the Vatican, I may be allowed to invent a "what if" scenario. "What if," then, the new pope were to be Italian? We would surely have in bioethical and sexual matters a more modern and less conservative attitude, more sympathetic to the sufferings of the multitudes in Africa who are scourged by AIDS. To these victims John Paul has obstinately refused contraception, for reasons of principle that risk becoming complicity in what could truly be a mass extermination. It was this refusal in particular that influenced the Nobel judges in Oslo in denying him the peace prize.

In a recent interview, Pazzi says "kings and popes are the tarot cards of my castle-building daydreams." Great. Perhaps next week the NYT will invite Pazzi's advice on the direction of immunodeficiency research at the Center for Disease Control.