St Mary of the Cross

Basically, In the context of Catholics going crazy over her, and others such as Catherine Deveny going crazy against this whole process, this sums up my position: If they want to have their sainthood party, why should I care? The Catholic Church can do some pretty horrible things in my opinion, but this canonisation isn’t one of them. I’ll stick to having a go at them for their horrific child abuse, condom use policy that leads to the infection with HIV/AIDS of sickeningly high numbers of people in Africa, and blatant intolerance and stigmatisation of any other sexual behaviour outside of heterosexual procreative missionary intercourse within marriage, and in particular their brutish discrimination againt homosexual activity. For all means, criticise the Catholics for what they deserve to be criticised over, but to me this St Mary business isn’t worth kicking up any sort of fuss over.

Incidentally, on Mike Stuchbery's blog in response to a suggestion by a commenter that "atheists go to the most desolate parts of Africa, where the Catholic church funds clinics to treat AIDS patients" I suggested that the church might want to change its condom policy if it really wanted to have an impact on HIV-AIDS rates. I received the response:

I’m sorry, but that argument is the biggest cop-out ever. I can’t imagine there are too many Catholic Africans having sex with prostitutes and raping their daughters… and refusing to wear a franger on moral grounds.

I was quite literally stunned to get such a response, this attribution of the whole terrible magnitude of this problem where in some countries HIV rates are greater than 20%, to some men "having sex with prostitutes and raping their daughters". I honestly spent about 10 minutes staring at the screen trying to comprehend this assertion. In the end I decided it was best to post one brief response and just leave it alone. Good Decision?