Vatican does U-turn to praise Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde once said, ‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’ and in a heavenly way the gay playwright found praise today from an unlikely source – the Vatican.

In its second U-turn in a week, the official mouthpiece of Pope Benedict XVI, L’Osservatore Romano, wrote that he was a man ‘always looking for the beautiful and the good but also for God’.

It also added that: ‘Wilde was a fortunate man, as more than 100 years after his death his works had not been forgotten and continue to fly off the shelves.’

The eulogy comes just days after the Vatican changed its stance to give its approval to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter – who it had once described as the ‘wrong kind of hero’.

Wilde, who converted to Roman Catholicism as he lay dying in a Paris hotel bed in 1900, served two years in prison for acts of gross indecency with men, and his behaviour shocked strait-laced Victorian England.

Given his homosexual tendencies and the Catholic Church’s strict view of homosexuality, the fact that it had now embraced him was all the more surprising.

The article praising the Irish-born writer was headlined ‘When Oscar Wilde met Pius IX’ and was a review of a new book on him called ‘A Portrait of Oscar Widle’ by Italian author Paolo Gulisano.

L’Osservatore Romano wrote: ‘Oscar Wilde was a man constantly looking for the beautiful and the good, but also for a God that he never challenged, respected and who he fully embraced after his dramatic experience of jail, concluding with his communion in the Catholic Church.’

Monda also noted how Dublin-born Wilde had said that ‘Catholicism was the only religion to die in’ and also recalled his little remembered audience with Pope Pius IX in 1877.

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Gay community bitterly disappointed by Obama’s lack of action

WASHINGTON — Gays and lesbians voted for President Barack Obama almost en masse after he pledged to be a relentless advocate for their civil rights while making his run for the White House.

But now the disappointment felt among the gay community about Obama’s inaction on issues that include same-sex marriage and the military’s so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is turning into outright anger.

“It’s disgraceful … shame on him,” Kate Waldeck, a 26-year-old medical student in New York City who voted for Obama believing he represented change on issues affecting the community.

The outrage is growing in the aftermath of last week’s California Supreme Court decision to uphold the state’s same-sex marriage ban.

Obama has had nothing to say about the ruling, something that has stung many in the community who had assumed the president might speak out against it and reiterate his commitment to their cause.

“I had sincerely hoped that Obama, both as a liberal and as a minority, might view this issue for what it is: an attempt at decency, and an opportunity to bestow long-deserved freedoms to people who have suffered through abuse and discrimination since the beginning of time,” Waldeck said in a recent interview.

Instead, Waldeck alleges, Obama is “sacrificing our lives to appease people, voters, interest groups, by allowing hate and bias to propagate.”

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