JUST WHEN I THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE to get back to more important issues this Sunday, now that I have completed the oppression of marking students’ work, the cleaning girls have more or less cleaned the house and I have had luncheon in a Middle-Eastern restaurant a brisk walk from my house, I am assailed by abhorrent news from the Vatican City involving Pope Benedict XVI.
I HAD COME IN RELAXED FASHION TO MY STUDY to complete my latest painting, a nude study that will look fetching above my desk, when I turned on Sky News and saw our good Catholic leader informing the planet, according to the lady on the programme, that wearing condoms was acceptable now.
LATIN IS A TRICKY LANGUAGE at the best of times, and I am not sure what language Joseph Ratzinger might have been speaking when he gave his interview to L’Ossatore Romano, but one hopes there is a misquotation of some sort involved in these most ominous of tidings.
NVAGDA WAS HOW WE WERE TAUGHT LATIN nouns at school: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative (and in some cases, locative). This was not too difficult to follow, except when one got down to the dative and ablative forms, which were regularly translated, in the case of a noun like Mensa, a table, as “to, at, through or for a table” and “by, through, with or from a table”.
THUS I HOPE THAT WHEN JOURNALISTS TELL US that the Pope has stated that condoms can be used “by men” when having sex “with men”, or “by male prostitutes with diseases” “for the prevention of disease”, that the whole thing is more of a translation mistake than my Oxford entrance examination in Latin was. But if the Roman Catholic Church is now suggesting that “if one has to have sex with a male prostitute then one should use a condom”, then my comment can only be one: unicuique suum.
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