MAN AS an endangered species, and "I'm not a rock star" - as annual office parties go, Pope Benedict's address to the Roman curia in his traditional end-of-year greeting in the Apostolic Palace was hardly light-hearted stuff.
In a speech yesterday that essentially touched on two of the major issues of Benedict's pontificate in 2008 - the midsummer World Youth Day in Australia and the Vatican's increasing emphasis on environmental concerns - the pope issued a vigorous defence of the youth gathering and of traditional, hard-line Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender issues.
"Great scholastic theologians have defined marriage, meaning the lifetime bond between a man and a woman, as a sacrament of creation which the Creator instituted and which Christ then welcomed into the story of his covenant with humanity."
However, that which is "often understood by the term gender" amounts to the "self-emancipation of the human person from creation and from the Creator".
In other words, human beings want "to do everything by themselves" and in this way, they live "against the truth, against the Creator spirit". It is in that sense that the pope sees man as an endangered species: "Yes, the tropical forests merit our protection, but the human being as a creature merits no less protection - a creature in which a message is written which does not imply a contradiction of our liberty, but rather the condition for it."
In this context, too, Benedict issues a stern defence of Pope Paul VI's controversial encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, saying that "the intention of Paul VI was to defend love against the idea of sexuality as mere consumption, to defend the future against the pressing demands of the present and to defend man's nature from being manipulated".
Benedict also defended this summer's World Youth Day in Australia, an event often criticised within the church as a "Catholic Woodstock" that concedes too much to the "spirit of this world" and which generates a personality cult around the pope himself.
Such criticisms, claim the pope, fail to "explain the uniqueness of these days, the special character of the joy they create and their capacity to create communion".
As for the pope himself: "Popular analysis tends to consider these days a church version of modern youth culture, as a type of rock festival with the pope as star. The pope "is not the star around which everything turns. He is totally, and solely, the Vicar."
Benedict, then, is no rock star. As an after-dinner speaker, too, he leaves just a little to be desired.