The left-leaning woman mayor of Genoa publicly challenged Pope Benedict XVI during his recent two-day pastoral visit to northern Italy by telling him a democratic State could not be expected to enforce the Church's absolutist moral teachings."As the great German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer maintained: ‘ethical conduct is not established in advance, once and for all, that is to say as a matter of principle, but it arises with the given situation'," said Marta Vincenzi last Sunday at a ceremony welcoming the Pope to Genoa.
The mayor, who is a public defender of legalised abortion, was courteous in her tone and admitted that "the Genovese Church" had every right to add its voice to the "public debate" on moral issues. But she cautioned against the danger of turning "ethics into a political battlefield".
Pope Benedict arrived in Genoa on Saturday and went immediately to the nearby city of Savona, the town where Napoleon had held Pope Pius VII prisoner from 1809 to 1812. The German Pope said that "obscure page of history" had significance for today.
"It teaches us courage in facing the challenges of the world - materialism, relativism and secularism - without giving in to compromise," he said. The words came just hours after about 1,000 people staged a "Lay Pride" march in Genoa to protest against what they perceived as the Church's interference in political and social affairs. It was the second time in four months that Italians had demonstrated against the Pope.
In January Benedict XVI decided to cancel a lecture at Rome's "La Sapienza" University days before the event because protests were being planned.
But the 81-year-old Pope has shown no signs of relaxing the magisterium's moral teachings. On 16 May, just days before travelling to Genoa and Savona, he told a European forum on Catholic families in Rome that the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (which reaffirmed the immorality of artificial contraception) went "courageously against the current regarding the dominant culture".
He also repeated his opposition to civil partnerships, saying that "marriage between a man and a woman ... [was] not to be confused nor equated with other types of unions".
And he endorsed the forum's call for governments to fund "family-related policies that give parents a real possibility of having children and bringing them up in the family".
A day earlier he told the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerants, "We must not forget that the family, even if they are migrants and itinerants, constitutes the original cell of society, that must not be destroyed, but defended."
He said migration was "an important frontier in the new evangelisation".
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