What about eyeglasses? God obviously intended you to be half-blind, who are you to presume to use artificial means to see.

What about antibiotics? God obviously intended these organisms to invade your wounds, who are you to presume to kill them?

What about fertility treatments? (one of my favorites). God obviously intended for you not to have children, who are you to presume to buck his will.

What about plastic surgery, corrective surgery, and viagra? All of them “presume” to interfere with “god’s plan”.

Funny how the one that involves making more catholics and turning women into broodmares is the inviolable one.

The Catholic Church has always oppressed women and continues to do so in policy and practice. Is this different in individual parishes across the world and particularly in the United States? I can answer emphatically yes.

However, control is the word of the day. This Pope won’t visit the U.S. he believes U.S. Catholics are going to hell. There has been strong opposition by U.S. Bishops to the conservatism and old world practices of the Church for about 10 years. Unfortunately not strong enough for the Catholic Church to survive in the U.S. The people filling our church here locally are people who have immigrated from 3rd world countries and the church provided a haven for them.

The Pope’s comments were despicable imo. It’s devastating for women who already have no voice when a powerful political figure affirms the rights of a man to infect his wife with the Aids virus. Despicable.

This isn’t about men who aren’t able to have sex. This is about oppression and power.

Personally, the Pope’s pronouncement appalled me. I seemed to be on the same line as those faith’s that reject medicine and surgery. I found it incredibly sad and criminally irresponsible. And as one of the other posters said, I question the lack of protests on the part of the press.

I have a Southern Baptist friend – and a nurse, for god’s sake! – who will go off for hours (if you let her) on the evils of birth control. Birth control is the cause of the increase of sexually transmitted disease, she says, because it’s taken the fear of pregnancy away from premarital sex. If you only have sex with one other person, and that person has only ever had sex with you, diseases wouldn’t get transmitted.

It’s not untrue I suppose, but for a religion that stresses man’s basic sinfulness, it’s astounding that they don’t see the need for some protection against the consequences of that “sinfulness” when it comes to sex.

And I write sexy romances and have always had what I thought was a pretty healthy sex life. All that Catholicism and the Church’s outdated attitude about sex never got in my way. However, it did make me think long and hard about premarital sex and consider it with great seriousness. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, either. Looking back at my life, I have few regrets.

I’ve remained within the Church by accepting that the Church is run by men…human men…so they are not infallible. And while Catholics are supposed to believe the Pope to be infallible…well, history proves otherwise. So I hold onto my faith and my belief in God’s love about rules and regulations of the organized church. Is this hypocritical? Not faithful? That’s for me and my soul to decide, thanks.

BTW, John Paul II wrote a wonderful encyclical on love that included sexual love and it was quite lovely. It was within the context of a marriage, of course, but it celebrated the love between a husband and wife. I personally do not believe that marriage is the only union that can produce deep love, but I do respect that a marriage should, at the very least, be a place where two people can find great love. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t write romance novels, much less read them.

Like Venus said, going against nature is bound to bite one in the ass, and judging from the number of sex scandals within the Catholic church, having to abstain from sex, tests even the most devout priests.

If God had truly meant for us to abstain from sex, I’m pretty sure he/she/it wouldn’t have given us sexual organs, just like he wouldn’t have given us mouths if he didn’t want us to speak.

When I was at school, we had a neighbouring high school that was known as the place to go to, if you wanted to become a teenage mother.

It was a Catholic school, and there were more teen pregnancies there than any of the normal schools in my town.

It seemed ironic that the girls and boys who were taught to fear sex for anything other than procreation, were the ones putting it about the most.

The young people at that school were way more promiscuous than they should have been, and I totally blame the repressive catholic teachings for that status quo.

I despise most organised religion anyway, but the Pope coming out with such idiotic and dangerous statements makes me want to smack him so hard, that he finally lands into the 21st Century.

The world has changed and will keep changing, yet so many religious figures seem happy enough to stay in the dark ages.

What the fuck is up with that?