Reading news coverage of the Church is hilarious when it isn't completely frustrating. Here's an AFP story about the Holy Father "fir[ing] a shot across the bows of radical feminism in a letter to Roman Catholic bishops to be published by the Vatican on Saturday."
The headline says "hits out," which doesn't make sense (they meant "lashes out," maybe?), but then English isn't AFP's first language. You have to really scrutinize the article to realize that this is not an encyclical, but merely a document approved by the Pope, not written by him.
[The document] says radical feminism's view of equality "has in reality inspired ideologies which for example call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and to make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent..."This would seem to be the latest in a series of Vatican documents attempting to clarify well-known Church teachings, which inevitably meet resistance even though they are stating the obvious. I think particularly of "Dominus Iesus," which contained the shocking revelation that the Roman Catholic Church understands herself to be the true Church of Jesus Christ.
The author calls Cardinal Ratzinger "the Church's powerful doctrinal enforcer," which makes him sound like a total badass -- which he is.
