The Vatican’s recent offering of a Ten Commandments for the road is a beautiful thing…at first glance. To be sure, it focuses attention on the single most used instrument of power to which most people have regular access and the use of which over which we have the greatest control – let’s face it, the average plane crash kills more people than does the average car wreck, but most of us are not pilots. In other words, this is something about which we can do something to make the world safer and our lives’ better. If that isn’t what religion should be doing, then something is really wrong. So, to that end, the Vatican deserves our praise for providing guidelines that are good for all of us, whatever our faith.

The use of the word “primitive” in the Church’s description of those elements of our being that are evoked by driving is particularly strange. Given that most migrant and itinerant people are poor and from the third world, the use of the word primitive should at least raise some eyebrows. Is that really the best language a bunch of people whose ministry is to such a population can use?