Pope Benedict gave a short, interesting, and profound speech on Friday. Of course, you won’t read about it in any of the mainstream media. Or if you do, it will be framed in a way that obscures and distorts its meaning. He was speaking to a meeting of the Centrist Democrat International, an international alliance of political parties devoted to promoting the idea of Christian Democracy. The member parties are drawn primarily from Europe and Latin America.

He called on the delgates to “prevent the dissemination and entrenchment of ideologies which obscure and confuse consciences by promoting an illusory vision of truth and goodness.”

And what are some of the illusions?

• Financial gain as the only good;
• it is legitimate to destroy life in its earliest or final states;
• the fundamental nucleus of society is [not] the indissoluble bond of marriage between a man and a woman.

The Pope said those are ILLUSIONS. And called upon Christian politicians to oppose them. I think the Pope is fundamentally correct when he asserts that these are not just Roman Catholic positions on the most important issues of the day – they are the Christian, biblical positions.

The Pope went on to defend the idea of religious liberty — for ALL religions. He said “religious freedom is a fundamental expression of respect for human reason and its capacity to know truth.”

And then he threw down the gauntlet to the Islamic world: “The exercise of this freedom also includes the right to change religion, which should be guaranteed not only legally, but also in daily practice.”

Because the mainstream media are so clueless on a)all matters of religion;  and b)anything having to do with the Pope, I would urge you to read the Pope’s speech for yourself. In fact, because the media do such terrible filtering and distorting, I’d urge you to read speeches by any political figure for yourself — but especially those by the Pope and by President Bush. Here’s a .pdf of the Pope’s speech taken from the Vatican website. Highlights are mine.

hat tip to the blog, Atlas Shrugs, where I ran across a reference to the speech.

-Rob Shearer
  Director, Schaeffer Study Center