The Economist's Tribute to Trujillo

Mr. P and I were eating breakfast, perusing the massive stack of magazines that usually covers our dining room table (it's only cleared off when guests come over). Much to our suprise- just because I don't think that the Economist usually concerns itself with such things- we discovered the following obituary in the May 1st edition. I really recommend that you read it; not only was it illuminating, but it was an honorable tribute to a true "Miles Christi."

Here's the intro; go here to read the rest.

Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, Vatican enforcer, died on April 19th, aged 72

AFP

IN 1995, as head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo published a “Lexicon of Ambiguous and Debatable Terms”. They included “safe sex” (no such thing, unless confined to the nuptial bed); “gender” (a construct of strident feminists) and “family planning” (code for abortion). He could also throw back a few phrases of his own: “contraceptive colonialism”, “pan-sexualism”, “new paganism” and, with a special lowering of those beetling black brows, “the culture of death”.

People sometimes forgot, when they met the cardinal, that he had studied Marxism as well as theology at the Angelicum in Rome. He could neatly trade jargon for jargon in the propaganda wars. Or he could write books entitled “Liberation and Revolution” to undercut, from the right, the theologians and priests in his native Latin America who thought they had a monopoly on those words. His red cardinal's skullcap was as much a battle statement as the beret of Che Guevara. “Prepare your bombers”, he wrote to a colleague just before the opening of the Latin American Bishops' Conference in 1979. “Get into training like a boxer going into a world fight.” Every day, on every front, this was López Trujillo contra mundum.

Comments

[Santiago]

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(in Spanish, with english subtitles)
See it: http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=YxjjyXhO9EA

Santiago (Granada, Spain)
http://opinionciudadano.blogspot.com/

[Benedicamus]

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[jackie parkes]

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