Prime reazioni a quella che si è rivelata alla fine, dopo varie incertezze, una sorprendente – seppur parzialissima e non magisteriale, cioè non specialmente autorevole – apertura del papa sui preservativi; reazioni, in particolare, dei bioeticisti cattolici, per i quali le parole di Benedetto XVI vanno contro la tradizionale dottrina della Chiesa che ha fin qui dichiarato illecita la scelta del male minore. Le riporta il New York Times di ieri (Rachel Donadio e Laurie Goodstein, «After Condom Remarks, Vatican Confirms Shift», 23 novembre 2010):
“We’re in a new world,” said the Rev. Jon Fuller, a Jesuit priest and a physician at the Center for H.I.V./AIDS Care and Research at Boston Medical Center. The pope is “implicitly” saying, he said, “that you cannot anymore raise the objection that any use of the condom is an intrinsic evil.”
Catholic conservatives who believed Catholic teaching against contraception to be inviolable were reeling. “This is really shaking things up big time,” said Dr. John M. Haas, the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, who serves on the governing council of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life.
Dr. Haas, a moral theologian, said he had seen an embargoed copy of a new book in which the pope conceded there might be extreme cases in which there were grounds for the use of condoms. “I told the publisher, ‘Don’t publish this; it’s going to create such a mess,’” he added. […]
Indeed, Dr. Haas, of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, could barely countenance Father Lombardi’s comments that broadened the debate to include women. “I don’t think it’s a clarification; it’s a muddying of the waters,” he said. “My opinion is that the pope purposely chose a male prostitute to avoid that particular debate.”
And if Benedict was in fact opening that debate? “I think the pope’s wrong,” Dr. Haas added.