I hate to abuse this dead horse any further, but remind me again why "knowledge" of what God intends, commands, designs, what have you is possible or valid? It's great that the Pope "knows" this, but while Riz and Wankler MD and some of the other Catholics on this forum are great people whom I respect, I am absolutely at a loss why anybody in the 21st Century should give a shit what the Vatican thinks or why we need sanctified old virgins to decide when and where biology and human desire are and are not out of line with some divine plan.
My bank manager who is a former priest and used to work as a clerk at the Vatican claims most of them are anything but.
Man, this takes me back to the days when the church would get all bent out of shape when folks would insinuate that the earth revolved around the sun, when it was God's obvious plan that the sun revolve around the earth. Damn heretics, daring to question what the church "knew" from god by noticing things they could actually "see" and "experience"
Full disclosure first. I'm not pro-gay, that much you'll probably have guessed, but i don't spend my time thinking about it tbh. But i also think being forced to be celibate can be viewed as being against "an order, set down by creation", which is why i am bemused by the Pope when he talks about what is and isn't against the "natural order".
On a tangent, i've heard that the the whole "people believed the Earth is flat" thang is a myth. I know that Greek, Egyptian and Islamic scholars had calculated the Earth's circumference before the Galileo episode, so i wonder whether there is more to it than "the Medieval Church and Europe thought the Earth was flat"? Although TBH it wouldn't surprise me if people who thought they were religious didn't let facts get in the way of their assumptions.
Europe actually regressed knowledge-wise on many fronts during the middle-ages. Several ancient Greek and Egyptian physicians for instance had a much better understanding of the human body than a lot of pre-Vesalius medieval doctors.
I couldn't find the original speech on the Vatican website, but the article looks like it emphasizes portions that were not its main theme. There is nothing bigoted or incorrect by claiming there are mental and behavioral differences between men and women that are genetically based. There is a crisis of masculinity in American culture at least. Too many men follow either the Scylla of impregnating women and then abandoning them, or the Charybdis of being such control freaks that they resort to violence to control the behavior of their spouses and children. I do not think that the solution is to ask men to behave like women and it is quite plausible that attempts to do so only exacerbate the problem. Why shouldn't the Church take a position and give recommendations that will help strengthen families? It's a heck of a lot cheaper than increasing the Family Court system.
Medieval Times You're that old? I don't think that male dominance over women is a unique feature of American culture. I don't think it's a feature at all. If anything, it's the opposite here. To suggest that other countries or cultures either don't practice subjugation of women or do it less than the USA is specious. Perhaps Europe has made more progress than us, but I don't see it elsewhere.
It was common knowledge in Europe since around 400 BC that the earth was round (at least in educated circles - which are the people we have to rely on of course, as nobody else wrote on the subject). This knowledge was never lost. Medieval authors who directly refer to the earth being round in their writings include Thomas Aquinas, Pope Sylvester II, Dante, Hildegard of Bingen, Jean de Mandeville , Hrabanus Maurus, Beda Venerabilis, Isidore of Seville, Albertus Magnus, Pierre d'Ailly, Berthold of Regensburg, and Honorius of Autun. There are a few writers (4 during the entire period of late antiquity and the middle ages) who argue that the earth is flat, but none of them was of any influence (one of the best known today, Cosmas Indicopleustes, was completely unknown in Latin speaking Europe as he wasn't translated from the original Greek into Latin until the 18th century). The myth that in the middle ages the earth was thought to be flat dates back to the 19th century. Washington Irving used it as a literary tool in his Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The myth was also used in anti-religious or anti-Catholic writings by Andrew Dickson White, Thomas Paine, Antoine-Jean Letronne and John William Draper, among others - mostly respected scholars. By the time of the early 20th century it had gained so much weight (as many other authors had used the influential writings of Letronne, White etc. as a source - not to mention the popularity of Irving's writings) that it was included in American textbooks. As for the disclosure thing: I'm not pro-anti-gay.