"[T]he very notion that a politician should have to check with the Vatican before making a pronouncement is scary."
Yes, but since the question is actually about whether the Pope has the right to say who should and should not approach the sacraments of the Church he is responsible to lead, not about what people can say, I fail to see your point.
What place does a medieval organization like the Vatican have in a modern multicultural society?
This is the sort of thing journalists seem to have a macro on their computer to spit out automatically. If only they knew history, or even science fiction. Michael Flynn, author of Eifelheim, has a spirited defense of medievals in the July/august 2007 issue of Analog in which he point out that:
The late Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr once said that about eighty-five medieval institutions "still exist today in recognizable forms, with similar functions and with unbroken histories." These include "the Catholic Church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and seventy universities."
He is arguing that the medieval mind was uniquely able, in the history of the world, to give birth to the scientific revolution. In the course of it he notes that the Medieval mind put such a premium on reason (because of its faith in a God who was reasonable) that they subject their own religious beliefs, as well as everything else, to the use of reason. He notes that western medievals are the people who *gave* us the idea of separation of Church and state among other things such as virtually everything necessary for the birth of the sciences. Oh, and they invented the hospital, the oldest democratic institution in the world (the Dominican Order), the rule of law, and sundry other ideas and institutions that have served to make the West such a prosperous and happy place so that numbskulls like Ms. Blizzard can say ignorant things to a large audience via technology. If the medieval institutions Ms. Blizzard so fears were finally eradicated, it would be a dark and ignorant world ruled almost entirely by force, fear, and superstition.
This:
Shea's Iron Law of Media-Reported Benedictine "Growth"
Whenever the press declares that Pope Benedict has "grown" or undergone a "dramatic change of course" or gone "a long way toward accepting positions he once seemed to reject as head of the Holy Office" this invariably means that Benedict has not, in fact, changed, but that the reporter had no clue whatsoever what Benedict (and often, the Catholic faith) previously thought and is only now discovering his views.
So, for example, when a reporter breathlessly announces:
Benedict emphatically sets aside the view that faith amounts to a form of law, and insists that the relationship of the believer to God through Christ defines Christian belief. He does not acknowledge his debt to Martin Luther, but it is palpable. He also says nothing of the priest, Matthew Fox, whom Cardinal Ratzinger silenced for his views on the centrality of the mystical knowledge of God to Catholic teaching. Theology is sometimes a contact sport, and this may be an example of yesterday's heresy becoming today's orthodoxy. A considerable body of non-Catholic biblical scholarship now accepts that Jesus himself taught his disciples mystical union with God, on the basis of the Judaism of his time, so the the position Benedict describes is more widely founded than he indicates.
...one hardly knows where to begin in confronting the sheer Himalayas of ignorance that lie behind such a concatenation of words. One wonders if the man who types such things has ever read the epistle to the Romans. The notion that Luther is the inventor and discoverer of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ is stupefying enough. But the invocation of a dim bulb like Fox and the apparent notion that mysticism and the law are mortal enemies, or that all mysticism is Christian, is just gobsmackingly ignorant. Likewise, the news flash that Jesus taught his disciples that mystical union with God was a good thing, combined with the suggestion that this is news to the leader of a tradition that includes Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross leaves one numb and helpless for words. It's like reading a high school sophomore burst into a chat room discussion on relativity among trained physicists to say, "If you're so smart, then tell me how light can be a particle and wave at the same time. Huh? Huh? Why don't you learn some *real* science? When are you going to admit you are just borrowing the best parts of what Gene Roddenberry told us long ago!"
Saints preserves us from religion reporters. I wonder if Get Religion is following this particular piece.
For a sane and informed take on the Pope's book, go here.
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