From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 22:25:53 MST
The Times had these theological insights, conveniently muddled and mutually
inconsistent:
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 07 2002
Illness caused by sin says
Vatican official
FROM RICHARD OWEN IN ROME
A SENIOR Vatican official has asserted
that illness is the result of sin and that
people have a natural desire to be “healthy
and good-looking”.
Presenting the Pope’s message for Lent,
Archbishop Paul Cordes, the German head
of the Vatican’s agency for humanitarian
aid, maintained that there was scriptural
authority for the idea that those who
contract illnesses do so because they have
sinned.
Father Georges Cottier, the Pope’s chief
theologian, immediately stepped in to
reassure those who were ill that they were
not in fact “paying for their sins”.
The Pope, in his message, had urged
genetic scientists and other health experts
not to succumb to the temptation of
“tampering with the Tree of Life” under
the illusion that advances in biotechnology
had made man his own creator.
Monsignor Cordes, elaborating on the
Pope’s remarks, went further and said that
the root of much modern illness lay in
sinful or immoral behaviour.
“Jesus heals sickness and banishes sin,” he
said. “He therefore teaches us that there is
a link between sin and illness. This does
not happen in every individual case, but it
is a fundamental law. The history of
salvation shows us that illness is a
consequence of sin.”
The theory was enshrined in Roman
Catholic doctrine, he said. “Man’s desire to
be healthy, good-looking and strong is
justified because it anticipates our future
salvation. One cannot deny that death, of
which illness is an anticipation, has always
been seen as a consequence of sin.”
He quoted the Gospel of St John, which
describes Jesus curing a crippled man he
found lying on a pallet by the pool of
Bethesda in Jerusalem. Jesus told the man,
who had been crippled for 38 years: “Take
up your bed and walk”. Finding him later
in the temple, Jesus ordered the cured man
to “go and sin no more, or something
worse may happen to you”.
Father Cottier said that the original sin
committed by Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden had “introduced sin and
suffering into the human condition”. This
was not the same as saying the sick were
guilty and it was unacceptable to use
passages from the Gospel in which Jesus
“frees people from sin” to suggest
otherwise.
Commenting on the altercation, La
Repubblica said that the idea that those
who were vigorous and good-looking
were blessed while the ugly and the sick
were damned was an ancient one that
predated Christianity. La Stampa said that
if illness really was the result of sin and
crime, then “the great dictators and
criminals of the world would all have been
struck down”.
Father Bruno Moriconi, a leading
theologian, said that illness was neither a
blessing nor a curse, but simply a result of
the malfunctioning of the human
organism. “There is no point in looking to
the Bible for an explanation.”
Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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