Pope Benedict the lactivist?

I’ll make a wild bet here and predict this will be one of very few posts in which I praise the Catholic church’s stance on anything having to do with women and reproduction. So I’m going to enjoy this moment.

The official newspaper of the Holy See, L'Osservatore Romano, has chided Catholics for being offended by depictions of Mary’s breastfeeding baby Jesus. "Jesus was a baby like all others. His divinity does not exclude his humanity," church historian Lucetta Scaraffia said, according to the British Telegraph. The newspaper noted that since the 17th century artists have been covering up Mary’s mammaries to avoid “unbecoming” “carnality” in sacred images.

But, as Father Enrico dal Covolo, a professor of classic and Christian literature at the Pontifical Salesian University, pointed out in L’Osservatore, that’s kinda the point. The word made flesh and all that.

You ask me (and you did, since you came to this page), there isn’t anything more sacred and symbolic of the human condition than a mother nursing a child. Anybody who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch was never breastfed (or owes his mother an apology).

I may never say this again: Go, pope!

Now I’ll get tiresome and suggest that the irrepressibility of the Mary cult shows how tortured Christianity is. The ancient worship of the mother goddess makes a whole lot more sense than the death cult that is the Jesus myth, and the weirdness of the Holy Trinity dissolves if you let the threesome be father, mother, and child... I’m sure theologians all over the Holy See are now smacking their heads, saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and turning right to revising their texts. Get to it, boys.