Conservative cardinals had challenged the pope to confirm teachings on LGBTQ+ issues
Pope Francis has suggested there could be ways to bless same-sex unions, responding to five conservative cardinals who challenged him to affirm church teaching on homosexuality ahead of a big meeting where LGBTQ+ Catholics are on the agenda.
The Vatican on Monday published a letter Francis wrote to the cardinals on 11 July after receiving a list of five questions, or dubia, from them a day earlier. In it, Francis suggests that such blessings could be studied if they did not confuse the blessing with sacramental marriage.
New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBTQ+ Catholics, said the letter “significantly advances” efforts to make LGBTQ+ Catholics welcomed in the church and represented “one big straw towards breaking the camel’s back” in their marginalisation.
The Vatican holds that marriage is an indissoluble union between man and woman. As a result, it has long opposed gay marriage. But Francis has voiced support for civil laws extending legal benefits to same-sex spouses, and Catholic priests in parts of Europe have been blessing same-sex unions without Vatican censure.
Francis’ response to the cardinals, however, marks a reversal from the Vatican’s current official position. In an explanatory note in 2021, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that the church could not bless gay unions because “God cannot bless sin”.
Why are there LGBT+ Catholic groups? Catholicism hates them and has since forever.
Jesus doesn’t care if you’re Catholic. The Golden Rule is all anyone needs to follow Jesus.
But what about the time that Jesus said “I tell you solemnly, you must hate all those who are different from you, for they steal jobs, send your nations into debt and corrupt your children. And also, I just got word from God, he says he’s giving every American the right to own a gun. Not sure what that means but someone write that down because it’s probably going to be important for later.”
Then he turned the temple into a market and punched a bunch of poor people or something.
Behold the teachings of Supply-Side Jesus.
This never gets old 🤣
Not the only example, but in my opinion, the clearest. I see no reason to give Jesus a pass here.
That’s Paul, not Jesus.
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According to who, Paul himself? The early church fathers? Paul came along after Jesus was already gone.
Do you have any idea how messy the canonization of scripture is? It’s a bloody circus.
Don’t buy the Evangelical party line; they’re as wrong about that as they are about most things.
wasn’t that part that was misstranslated?
The theory among some open, accepting Christians is that Paul was actually talking about the various abusive practices like pedophilia that were common among the ancient Greek peoples of the region.
The ancient and classical world was a profoundly fucked up place.
common among the ancient Greek peoples of the region.
the catholic church showed that pedophilia isn’t common only with ancient greek sadly
“God cannot bless sin”.
God: lmao watch me
“And we specifically call this particularly entertaining sin the ol’ Vatican Reversal.”
If that doesn’t get a particularly gay sex act named after it, I’ll be disappointed.
This just in: King of millenia old pedophile ring admits being Gay is okay I guess.
Pedophiles have been blessed for centuries in the church, but gay people is still controversial to them
I know it’s easy to ask why LGBTQ folks would care about something like this, and I felt the same way until recently.
One of my best friends is a gay man. He was out and living a happy life until his mother got cancer and died.
He blamed himself for being gay and not religious enough for her death, so he decided to go full catholic like she was - Mass every day, prayers all the time, and become celibate, I guess, I don’t ask and we live in different states.
So for his sake, I hope this will be something positive in his life so he can stop feeling guilty and ashamed.
But isn’t the church the reason why he feels that way in the first place?
Yeah, and I’m not excusing them. I was raised in it too and left as soon as I turned 18.
But I see lots of comments saying things like “Why would LGBTQ folks care…the church hates them, etc” and I was explaining why, at least, this one person does.
The church could spontaneously combust tomorrow and the world would be a better place for it. I’m not excusing them, I hate them…I miss my friend who has changed so much and listens to Jesus podcasts and shit and doesn’t really talk about much else. Fuck the church.
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They helped plenty of Nazis escape to Argentina, as well.
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He’s a PR pope. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a homophobic, woman hating bigot long before he was pope. Even for Argentina he was considered conservative. This whole “progressive pope” angle is nothing but PR after the last Nazi youth pope was so disliked.
Pope Francis to this day refuses to acknowledge or meet with the victims of his priest’s sexual abuse, and treats the victims like they don’t exist, turning them away from the Vatican.
He’s a bigger monster than most Popes just because he’s such a fake
It seems like the more conservative catholics attack him the further left he goes.
He wants headlines that induce exactly the kind of opinion you just espoused. Looks like it’s working.
As always society has to drag religions kicking and screaming to the future.
It’s more the opposite, that religion was dragging society into the past.
Around 30 years after Jesus and around 5-10 before the first gospel is written, Nero, emperor of Rome, married two men. First as the wife and then as the husband.
Suddenly the gospel that’s written right after it is adamant that the guy who died thirty years before this happened was all like “marriage is between a man and a woman.”
So gay marriage was a thing, but then the rise and spread of Christianity with a conservative social take made it so that it wasn’t for a very long time.
50 years before Jesus is born, Leucretius described natural selection and mendelian trait inheritance in surprisingly explicit detail.
The surviving copy of that book from antiquity ended up being eaten by worms in a church library until it was liberated by the secretary of the Pope bribing a monk to bring it to his Renaissance book club.
So no, it’s not so much modernity dragging the church forward, it’s that finally the church has temporarily lost the ability to hold modernity back.
But looking at book bans or education ‘reforms’ in the US south, there’s certainly efforts underway to dig those claws back in.
From some other articles I’ve seen recently, it’s possible this could cause a split in the church. And if it does… good. Maybe that needs to happen for the Vatican to evolve into the modern era.
The United Methodist church recently split over LGBTQ issues. The main branch of the church will remain progressive, but individual congregations are deciding whether to leave or stay. It is being handled well, but there are still a lot of hard feelings on both sides.
A few years ago a group pulled a surprise vote and pushed through some very conservative policies. The majority did not support them, but the process of walking them back is what caused the split.
The Vatican seems to be trying to find a middle ground on these issues. I understand why, but I wish they would just do the right thing (or, in this case, the left thing) and adopt a progressive position. It seems likely that a schism is going to happen anyway.
Lol imagine being Catholic and having to wait as these old fucks debate to figure out if Jesus loves you or not
Yeah I don’t get this with christians. Jesus did not seem to withhold blessings much.
Why isn’t this in /c/business
Cool. Now don’t be theatrical, do something about the pedophiles you’re cover up for.
Not enough let them marry and deal with your pederasses
Change takes time. Encourage more acceptance rather than being angry a small step in the right direction is too small. This would actually be a rather large step if they move forward on this!
I mean, has it even been legal in the states for a decade yet?
Easily the best pope they ever had.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Pope Francis has suggested there could be ways to bless same-sex unions, responding to five conservative cardinals who challenged him to affirm church teaching on homosexuality ahead of a big meeting where LGBTQ+ Catholics are on the agenda.
The Vatican on Monday published a letter Francis wrote to the cardinals on 11 July after receiving a list of five questions, or dubia, from them a day earlier.
But responding to the cardinals’ question about homosexual unions and blessings, he said “pastoral charity” required patience and understanding, and priests could not become judges “who only deny, reject and exclude”.
The five cardinals, all of them conservative prelates from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, had challenged Francis to affirm church teaching on gay people, women’s ordination, the authority of the pope and other issues in their letter.
The signatories were some of Francis’ most vocal critics, all of them retired and of the more doctrinaire generation of cardinals appointed by St John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI.
Brandmueller and Burke were among four signatories of a previous round of dubia to Francis in 2016 after his controversial opening to letting divorced and civilly remarried couples receive communion.
The original article contains 784 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
