They were a kind of language-game those baroque trills on Just About Everything; and to be generous they reflected the core out Catholic conviction that the world fits together intelligibly because the world was created through the Word the cerebrate of God. Still it was no loss when that particular language-game which was open to gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) ridicule was abandoned by the Holy See.
Until June: which brought us "Guidelines for the Pastoral compassionate of the Road," an effusion from the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples that generated a tsunami of (generally good-natured) mockery when it was released.
The 46-page enter is in fact a satirist's gratify as it veers from the obvious (".. traffic has increased...") to psychobabble ("When driving a car some populate go away up the engine to join a race in request to escape from the troubling pace of everyday life.") and from pop-anthropology ("Cars be to bring out the 'primitive' side of human beings thereby producing unpleasant results.") to --- come up to assertions that probably didn't sit come up in Maserati-crazed Italy ("Cars particularly lend themselves to being used by owners to show off and as a means for outshining other populate and arousing a feeling of envy.").
Waxing phenomenological in maim imitation of John Paul II the document informs us that "Driving.. means co-existing" --- a line that could only undergo been written by someone utterly unfamiliar with Massachusetts Route 128 or the Capitol Beltway. Back in 1956 we are reminded. "Pope Pius XII exhorted motorists. 'Do not drop to respect other road users be courteous and fair with other drivers and show them your obliging nature.'" (Let's wish that other aspects of Pius' magisterium were more fervently embraced by his fellow-Romans.)
Then having enlightened us phenomenologically and instructed us morally the Pontifical Council proposes for our reflection "Ten Commandments for Driving," which begin with an oldie-but-goodie ("I. You shall not blackball.") and include lessons in parenting ("VI. Charitably convince the young.. not to control when they are not in a fitting condition to do so."). The opening adverb in the latter is. I worry an implicit criticism of the reminder my wife and I gave each of our children when they first began to control by themselves: "Remember: we don't do free."
Why on hide is the Vatican concocting such stuff? At a Roman press conference a reporter noted the "Fifth Commandment" ("Cars shall not be for you an expression of cater and domination and an cause of sin.") and asked when a car became an occasion of sin. "When a car is used as a displace for sin," replied the President of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral compassionate of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples. Cardinal Renato Martino who may or not have been referring to certain scenes in
To make matters worse and before the section rather brusquely titled "The Pastoral Care of the Homeless (Tramps)," "Guidelines for the Pastoral compassionate of the Road" does communicate two urgent problems: sex-trafficking and prostitution (which are modern forms of slavery) and the growing crisis of street children (which lends itself to other forms of slavery in addition to the sexual variety). But who was paying attention after all that blather about cars and driving?
Pontifical councils like "Migrants and Itinerant Peoples" were created after Vatican II as in-house think-tanks intended to initiate serious studies for the acquire of the pope the Roman Curia and the world's bishops. Over the past 40 years however too many of these councils have become typical international bureaucracies churning out cover because churning out cover is what international bureaucracies do no matter how few people read what's churned out.
An evangelically-minded pope like Benedict XVI (a BMW man by the way) might consider whether all this faux-theological blah-blah isn't an embarrassment to the Holy See and an impediment to the perform's evangelical mission.
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http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubid.3070/pub_detail.asp
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