Pope formally allows priests to bless same-sex couples
pbs.org
pbs.org
This pope seems to be somewhat progressive and that is welcome. This is consistent with previous statements he has made:
https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-gay-rights-ap-interv...
Some argue that the biblical passages against homosexuality are actually mistranslations, although I am not an expert on that, but there is a new movie on that concept (which I also have not watched):
Anyhow, cool pope, even though I am both not catholic by heritage nor even religious myself.
The Catholic position is that is not possible, for a few reasons:
1. The Doctors of the Church (a period of early writers from the first 300 years or so of Christianity), when they unanimously agree on an issue, are considered to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and almost certainly infallible. The discipline of the Church is to treat them, on unanimous agreements, as such.
2. 1 Corinthians 6:9 has Saint Paul explicitly stating that homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God. Maybe this is a mistranslation; but when Ezekiel 16:50 uses a word from Greek that means "sexually disgusting," Leviticus 18:22 remarks that it is an "abomination," and Jude 1:7 states that "Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion," it's very hard to claim that all the verses were mistranslations. If that is the case, we may as well say that the Bible is not inspired and is not infallible - which would, quite literally, mean the Catholic religion (or any Christian religion) has no reason to exist.
3. If rape and inhospitality were the primary sin of Sodom; the men of the city would have been willing to take Lot's suggestion of using his daughters for their appetites. Lot was also an "outsider" in a cultural sense already - so it would stand to reason (as multiple commentators point out from ancient and modern sources) that if it was purely about violence to the stranger, Lot's offer should have been acceptable. The fact that Lot's offer was not acceptable shows the homosexual inclinations of the city.
With the above evidence, the Catholic position is that while inhospitality was certainly part of the condemnation upon those cities, it was not the primary cause. The alternative position is, correctly or not, a modern view to explain away the inconvenient.
Edit: Also, fun fact, there is a city that is in the correct place, dating back to the correct time, that appears to have been destroyed from an asteroid. There's no evidence to prove with certainty that it is Sodom, but that's because almost nothing from the city survives. Either it is Sodom or it inspired the story, but it's interesting. I can admit though that the odds of a massive asteroid perfectly landing on a city of only 8,000 people certainly seems divine.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-cit...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2018/12/04/new-science...
Edit 2: The Bible is infallible in the Catholic view. Vatican II explicitly stated: "The books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation." This does not mean that little historical or otherwise facts may not be different, so the term preferred on a technical level is inerrant.
https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_coun...
The passage from Leviticus seems explicitly about male homosexuality, but Ezekiel seems more vague in this translation:
> 49 “‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. 50 They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.
And Jude also doesn't seem to explicitly mention homosexuality, but I guess it's calling back to another piece of writing that the reader is expected to be familiar with.
This seems like a type of survivorship bias: The relatively-few ancient manuscripts we have are largely those that were preserved by those who canonized what they regarded as "proper" doctrine.
(Example: Paul's epistles included complaints that people were deviating from what he regarded as the "true" gospel. See Gal. 1.6-11.)
Tangentially, here's a piece from 2004, applying a litigator's perspective about documentary evidence and witness testimony: https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/why_i_cant_acce... [self-cite]
Only after Martin Luther is that the idea of "Sola Scriptura" was popularized.
But to cover a couple of verses quoted in point 2, just in case it is helpful for people trying to combat people wielding these to attack them:
Ezekiel 16:50 - It's not clear that the toevah in Ezekiel is a sexual sin. Just because it is used in that way in some places is to ignore all the places it isn't. The point of Ezekiel 16:49-50 is that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality. If it should be interpreted as a sexual sin, there is nothing to say it is specifically sodomy [1]. It can easily be argued the sexual sin is the attempted rape of angels.
Jude 1:7 - Similarly, there isn't anything here that identifies it as sodomy rather than rape.
Countering the others, though, I think _does_ require letting go of univocality and infallibility.
[1] Homosexuality isn't really a concept at this time. Instead of attraction, they focus on acts and power.
Be it issues as simple as COVID guidelines or gay love / blessings (we can't call it marriage but this step is still more than other sects will take)
This is not to say that the Catholic Church of that time would be viewed as progressive today, but rather that much of the rejection of the Catholic Church was borne of the notion that the Catholic Church was too secular and not fundamental enough.
OK, so if a bishop or priest is blessing lots of people in crowd, he doesn’t have to ask nosey questions. Fine.
But the document clearly forbids anything close to marriage.
The document seems very restrictive, but trying to seem liberal.
This is kind of like the Pope saying married couples shouldn’t have too many kids - just don’t use birth control.
It’s a document that’s intended to be disobeyed.
The issue here, theologically, is that Catholics believe that marriage and sex are both for procreation. That's a core tenant, and same sex couples cannot procreate.
EDIT: I think that the Church accepting that same sex couples can have blessings and a life filled with love and togetherness is still important. And I also think that's mostly what (Catholic) same-sex couples want.
This fine print?
It seems to be a blessing over the love they share, even if we cannot give them formal marriage rites.
The issue is the Catholic Church teaches that sexuality is only legitimate in a "lifelong partnership of the whole of life, of mutual and exclusive fidelity, established by mutual consent between one man and one woman, and ordered towards the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring."
You can see why blessing a "gay" couple, even without intent to approve of their situation, would appear to contradict the teaching, or at a minimum cause confusion.
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pu...
Jesus didn't really say anything about it, the best you can say is that when he talked about marriage (which was sparsely little) he only mentioned men and women but that's not really the same as exclusion. And given the rest of what we know about Jesus he totally would have married two dudes if he had ran into a couple asking for the sacrament.
The Bible is full of examples of gender nonconformity Jacob & Esau, Deborah, Tryphaina and Tryphosa, Euhodia and Syntyche. To say look at all these women taking on male roles and men taking on female roles and it being totally fine but then saying no no you can't do that for marriage (or the priesthood) is drawing a line for no reason. A man taking the role of a wife or a woman taking the role of a husband isn't really out of line for the bible.
But different Catholic populations around the world have different degrees of dogmatism, and papal statements like this can have profound human rights impacts in the long run.
The Pope's job is to figure out how to keep the Church unified in matters like this.
This is the issue of our time. Centuries from now, other issues will split the opinions of individual church members but the Pope's of the future will continue to try to keep the Church unified despite those issues.
> We completely ignore most of our holy text anyway
Biblical Literalism is heretical. The Church has always placed emphasis on tradition
Catholic Faith Mysteries like the Assumption of Mary were never in the Bible but instead a tradition of the Catholic Church. From the start or at least documented to nearly the start of our Religion: we got documentation of these traditions dated to like 300ish A.D.
Gonna need a citation for this boss. Because it's laughably not true.
There is certainly not a deluge of Catholic priests running to perform gay marriages in a Catholic ceremony. Why? Because all it would take is a single person complaining in the local diocese would result in almost immediate defrocking.
I've heard stories of a few that would perform civil marriages, but in no circumstance would there any percentage of those that would perform those marriages under the guise of a Catholic sacrament.
And as far as ignoring the holy text, that doesn't make any of it more or less right or wrong. You just have a whole bunch of cafeteria Catholics in 2023, and theism of any kind is becoming less relevant. That's a far cry from a sect Christianity like Methodist, who take a much more liberal interperatation, and expressly allow it as a sacrament.