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	Related links Official Vatican Web site The Vatican home page. This contains everything from maps of the Vatican to rules for scholars seeking access to the Roman Church’s "secret archives." Under "Holy Father," it also reprints all of the encyclicals and other writings of the last ten popes. John XXIII’s "Instruction on Proceeding in Cases of Solicitation" This can’t be good news for Pope John XXIII. In 2003, the Guardian reported on this then-recently uncovered 1962 Vatican document instructing all Catholic bishops throughout the word to keep all allegations of sexual abuse secret under threat of excommunication. Antony Barnett’s article is here as is Pope John’s document, stamped CONFIDENTIAL. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Montera David I. Kertzer’s masterful 1998 The Kidnapping of Edgardo Montera is a thrilling account of how the Vatican’s 1858 kidnapping of a six-year old Jewish boy, who had allegedly been secretly baptized, erupted into a worldwide scandal that eventually brought about the fall of the papal states. Great history as well as a look into how the political power of the Vatican has risen and fallen in the past.

Simultaneous with these and other conservative pronoucements on sexual matters, John XXIII launched new mission efforts in the Third World and urged the ordination of " native clergy " to work with their own people. This international initiative — undertaken in the context of the Cold War and decolonization — was akin to the great territorial conquests of the 15th and 16th centuries, and provided the basis for the cultural and theological make-up of the Church today. The Church, in other words, did not offer " liberation " in any of the Marxist or libertarian, self-expressive ways American liberals understand it (liberation theology notwithstanding). Instead, it imposed a severe form of discipline that rivaled others in a bloody post-war world governed by realpolitik.

John XXIII’s successor, Paul VI, shifted even further toward hard-line positions on personal morality as he reaffirmed the Church’s ban on birth control (in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, he rejected the more moderate recommendations of a commission appointed by John XXIII) and divorce, and insistence on celibacy for priests. And, along with urging more missionary work in the Third World, he insisted on a larger role for non-European, non-American Catholics and clergy, going so far as to alter the composition of the College of Cardinals to ensure that some of them came from Third World countries. Of course, the greatest shift in tone came from John Paul II, who continued the lead of his predecessors with more-insistent demands that the Church’s teachings on sexual morality and reproduction not only be followed by Catholics and non-Catholics, but be enacted into secular law. He did this by issuing numerous statements condemning legislation that promoted reproductive rights, abortion, access to alternative means of reproduction, anti-discrimination laws to protect gay people, and laws protecting alternative families.

American liberals have protested the Vatican’s interference with American democracy. Perhaps blinded by their own romantic notions of multiculturalism, however, they generally ignore the fact that since 1960, the Church has radically shifted away from the West and its democratic values, largely as a means of shoring up its own temporal power. The Vatican ceased to be a vital geopolitical power sometime in the early-19th century with the gradual erosion of the Papal States and the advent of modernism. In decline as a player in world politics for more than 100 years, the Roman Church found a way to regroup and reinvigorate itself. But it did so in ways that appealed to the conservative instincts of its new non-Western following.

THE LIBERAL fantasy of the reformable Church — which draws validation from the myth that John XXIII was progressive through and through — is a complete cultural illusion. The reality is that despite the efforts of dissident elements, the Church has rarely changed its position on sexual matters and is not about to do so now. But there is a second liberal illusion about the Vatican and the Roman Church that goes hand in hand with this: that the Church does not have a great deal of power. In fact, having relocated its strength outside Europe and North America, the Roman Church is more powerful now than it has been for almost 200 years.

In the coming years we will see this power play out in a variety of venues. One of the most important — aside from American politics — will be the United Nations, as Third World countries with large Catholic populations vote on funding for health issues such as birth control, AIDS prevention, and sex education. Some primarily Catholic countries have already formed voting alliances with Islamic countries on women’s rights and sexual issues, especially the relaxing of regulations on homosexuality.

Indeed, we have already seen how the Vatican’s blinkered strictures on sexual activity have led to health-care disaster. In November 2003, Alfonso Cardinal López Trujillo, the Vatican’s spokesperson on family affairs, stated that " relying on condoms is like betting on your own death, " claiming — as scientific fact — that condoms are too permeable to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. Although the World Health Organization immediately countered this show of ignorance with the well-documented information that condoms are a highly efficient means of preventing the spread of HIV, Trujillo responded that " they are wrong about that ... this is an easily recognizable fact. "

This blatant, deadly, and intentional falsehood was carried from the Vatican by bishops and cardinals not in the United States or Europe, but in Asia and Africa, where the Church is growing the most briskly and where AIDS is spreading the fastest. For example, 20 percent of the population of Kenya is HIV-positive, but the Roman Catholic clergy has not only repeatedly condemned condom use as immoral — for promoting both promiscuity and form of birth control that is against natural law — but also publicizes and reiterates the lie about condom permeability. As AIDS spreads across these countries, the death toll climbs higher and higher.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Vatican’s Inquisition would kill people for not adhering to Church doctrine. Now they face near-certain death if they do follow that doctrine. As Karl Marx succinctly noted, history repeats itself " the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. "

Michael Bronski’s latest book is Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com