In an article entitled, Cigarette Smoking and the Church's "Pro-Life" Position . Science writer Elizabeth M. Whelan, Sc.D., M.P.H. shrieks of anti-Catholicism with this statement,Where, for example, is the voice of the Roman Catholic Church, which is apparently so committed to a "pro-life" position? Why are they not deeply concerned about the lives of the millions who will soon die from this now-intensified Philip Morris sales blitz?
Where, for example is the voice of Elizabeth M. Whelan, Sc. D., M.P.H., which is apparently so committed to an "anti-smoking" position? Why is she not deeply concerned about the forty million innocent babies who have died at the intense pro-abortion genocidal blitz?
Here she points to the Pope's statement about smoking and the Jesuits in the 1950's.
To say that the Roman Catholic Church's stance on the public and personal health implications of cigarette smoking has been dismal would be an understatement. The Church has been largely mute on the subject, more concerned with the moral depravity of alcohol and illicit drug use than smoking. Indeed back in the 1950s, when the avalanche of data on smoking and disease began to hit the medical journals, the cigarette companies were terrified that the Catholic Church might make a pronouncement about smoking's imperiling of human life and health. But the Church did not. Of course, the tobacco folks had a real scare back in 1957 when Pope Pius XII suggested that the Jesuit order give up smoking.
There were only 33,000 Jesuits in the world at that point, so the industry was not afraid of losing lots of priest-customers. ( The concern over the number of Jesuit's, is certainly based on perspective.)
But they did worry that the Pope might eventually ask the question, as a magazine headline once put it: "When Is a Cig a Sin?" -- and, worse yet, that the answer might be "always." So the spin doctors in the industry worked on the Pope's Jesuit statement and came up with this: an industry rep wrote in the United States Tobacco Journal, "the Jesuits have a way of life that is traditionally stricter than other segments of the clergy or laity in general." What the Pope was really saying, the industry argued, was that cigarette smoke is good fun and pleasurable, and the only reason Jesuits should not smoke is that they are supposed to reject human gratification. Thus smoking is fine for everyone else!
I used to be a smoker for eleven years, I surely understand the attraction to smoking. The real sin is the waste of money I spent on cigarettes.
Read the full article (here)
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Pope Urban VIII and smoking (here)
Pope John Paul II and smoking (here)
A book review of , A Smoking Gun: How the Tobacco Industry Gets Away with Murder (here)
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