Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I don't even know why Catholic leadership even bothers keeping this up. We completely ignore most of our holy text anyway and plenty of Catholic priests will perform gay marriages against the will of the Vatican. There's as much theological backing to support same sex marriage is there is to call it sinful.

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.

> I don't even know why Catholic leadership even bothers keeping this up. We completely ignore most of our holy text anyway and plenty of Catholic priests will perform gay marriages against the will of the Vatican.

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.

Because the Catholic Church is top-down and tries to be unified, unlike other churches that are bottom up and therefore more chaotic.

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.

Who is “we”? I would guess you are describing the garden-variety US “cafeteria Catholic.”

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.

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