Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI has come under fire from a leading Vatican watcher as "The Pope who says No" following a series of "negative" Vatican statements on homosexuality, the disabled and bio-ethics.
On Friday the Vatican made its most authoritative statement on bio-ethics for twenty years, condemning artificial fertilization, human cloning, "designer babies" and embryonic stem-cell research. The document, "Dignitas Personae" (Dignity of the Person) was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which the Pope headed as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before his election as pontiff.
The document also condemned the "morning-after pill" and the drug RU-486, which blocks the action of hormones needed to keep a fertilized egg implanted in the uterus. It said such drugs, as well as the IUD (intrauterine device), fell "within the sin of abortion" and were "gravely immoral".
Marco Politi, the veteran Vatican correspondent of La Repubblica, said this was "yet another papal no" after Vatican opposition to UN declarations on the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the rights of the disabled, on the grounds that they could be seen a sanctioning gay marriage and abortion.
"It is one veto after another" Mr Politi wrote. "Not to this, no to that. No, no, no". He said the Vatican was clearly aware that under Pope Benedict it was acquiring a reputation for "banning everything", since it had issued a "pre-emptive statement" noting that "on a superfical first reading" the document on bio-ethics "might give the impression of being a collection of prohibitions". "But that is precisely the public perception", Mr Politi said.
Mr Politi, the author with Carl Bernstein of "His Holiness", a study of Pope John Paul II and the fall of Communism, said the Vatican risked appearing to put the stress on a rigid observance of doctrine ahead of human dilemmas, suffering and distress.
Mr Politi said the German-born Pope Benedict, elected after the death of John Paul II in April 2005, had sought to confound his reputation as a doctrinal hardliner by devoting his first encyclical to the topic of love and compassion. He was capable of a "surprising capacity for involvement and great tenderness" when visiting parishes. The message he sought to convey was that "Christianity is joy".
This was not the impression he gave to the world, however. Instead he had opposed reforms such as a long discussed revision of doctrine allowing divorced Catholics to take Holy Communion, and had also failed to carry out his promise to dedicate himself to inter faith dialogue and the "full and visible unity" of all Christians.
Instead he had gone out of his way to stress the obstacles in the way of ecumenism, and had recently declared that inter-religious dialogue "in the strict sense of the word" between Christians, Jews and Muslims was "not possible". He had a "minimalist vision" of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
The only "reforms" carried out in the past three years, Mr Politi said, were the revival of the Latin mass and the provision of new and "more miliaristic" uniforms for the Vatican gendarmerie. It was not question of Catholic doctrine, which remained the same under Pope Benedict as it had under John Paul II. The problem was rather Benedict's "insufficient capacity for speaking to the world" in the way John Paul had done.
Whereas John Paul had skilfully used the media, going out of his way to talk to Vatican journalists on papal trips, Pope Benedict "keeps his distance", responding only to a limited number of questions submitted in advance, Mr Politi said. When encountering reporters while on holiday, "the first words to pass his lips are "Thank you, no questions". Attendances at papal audiences had fallen from over four million in the first year of Benedict's pontificate to below three million.
Giovanni Miccoli, the religious historian, said Pope Benedict's pontificate so far had been "rich in declarations but poor in facts". Mario Morcellini, Professor of Communications at Rome University, said Pope Benedict has rightly not sought to imitate his predecsssor. "But he seems to have difficulty in coming out of his shell and entering into contact with the masses", Professor Morcellini said, adding that it was "not clear if this was intentional".