pope benedict xvi

The top films for 2010—especially those up for this Sunday’s awards—leave most of the species-specific questions behind. Instead this year’s crop reflects anxieties (as well as promises) about who we are and who we might be becoming in and as humans, in our own skins—never mind the “prawns” or “Na’vi.” Questions provoked by this year’s films include those concerning the nature of our selves in connection and collision with our families, our larger social institutional entanglements, and our own bodies. The other key theme, effecting each of the others, had to do with the ways new media technology is inserting itself into our intimate lives, and changing our identities, both public and private.

Papal consultant Edward N. Peters, who is also a professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, has stated in no uncertain terms that Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, should be shown no mercy. His offense? Seems that the governor has been shacking up—not with underage boys, mind you, but with his longtime partner, Sandra Lee. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Cuomo also supports same-sex marriage and believes that abortion is a private matter that shouldn’t be regulated by the state.

Catholic women priests are an oxymoron for the Vatican. It considers them automatically excommunicated before the holy oil is dry on their hands. Other Catholics accept them as sacramental ministers and are delighted with the innovation. Still, others, myself included, want far deeper structural changes in the Catholic Church such that priesthood loses its baked-on charm and ministry becomes the expected task of adult members. This is an important theological conversation that the Vatican wishes would go away. Memo to them: it is just starting.

The gracious, affirmative, and arguably universalist tone of Pope Benedict’s encyclical (in marked contrast to his 2010 letter, with its emphasis on the authority of the priest as this fed upward through the hierarchy of the Roman Church) is more than a nod to the new digital social reality. Sure, it’s perhaps a little silly for the Pope to be “inviting” Christians into locales through which most have been travelling regularly for several years by now. But it is nonetheless important that he has offered his spiritual and ethical leadership into the increasingly digitally integrated world.

But dialogue is what we need most in difficult times

Pontiff uses year-end address to raise spectre of battle.

In the Pope’s words, the current debate over state-sponsored heterosexual marriage is ultimately a question that concerns the European identity itself. The stakes, then, could scarcely be higher.

When a serious philosophical lecture on the origin and meaning of Santa Claus is interrupted by the tinkling of bells, jovial laughter, and the mysterious delivery of a case of beer, our writer has the chance to muse on his own former Christmastime convictions.

On numerous occasions Pope Benedict has ignored the connection between Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism, and when posed a question about German responsibility for the Holocaust he fails to address it directly.

Whether it’s Pope Benedict’s recent comments about condoms and HIV, or the story of a pregnant Mary, looking for a place to give birth, ’tis the season for Roman Catholics to talk about sexuality and sexual health education.