Papal frontrunner says he won't be muzzled on marriage [John Allen]

[Catholic_Press]

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan, widely considered a leading candidate to be the next pope, said May 4 that if he believes “the family must be founded on a union between a man and a woman, and open to life,” then he has a duty to proclaim those beliefs publicly rather than avoiding contentious social debates.

For believers to keep their convictions out of politics, Scola said, would reflect an unacceptably “limited concept of secularism.”

Scola made the remarks at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, during a lecture delivered before a conference on “Institutions, Societies and Markets,” sponsored by the Centesimus Annus Pontifical Foundation, devoted to Catholic social teaching.

Scola quoted French philosopher Paul Ricouer to the effect that a healthy civil society is based not on a “bland secularism,” in which opposing points of view are squelched, but on “mutual recognition” of differing perspectives on the good life.

“I can propose my beliefs, you can propose yours, and from there a dialectic is born,” Scola said. “Then we find out what the prevalent opinion is.”

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[mdgspencer]

Personally I think it is absurd when the media calls anyone a Papal frontrunner or candidate. I recall that before Pope John Paul II was elected pope, the media came up with a number of “candidates” for the papacy, analyzing the likelihood of each of them. None of them even mentioned the Polish cardinal who became pope. There is an old saying, man proposes, God disposes. Personally, I don’t pay attention to media proposals about who may well become the pope.
This is not to say that this cardinal doesn’t have admirable views. But the views of the media are less credible.