Free Republic

...Many nations have regulated civil unions. Is it a path that the Church can understand? But up to what point? [Pope:]Marriage is between a man and a woman. Secular states want to justify civil unions to regulate different situations of cohabitation, pushed by the demand to regulate economic aspects between persons, such as ensuring health care. It is about pacts of cohabitating of various natures, of which I wouldn't know how to list the different ways. One needs to see the different cases and evaluate them in their variety. ...At half a century from Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, can the...

Half of all Americans believe that gay men and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which a large majority also said businesses should not be able to deny serving gays for religious reasons. Fifty percent say the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection gives gays the right to marry, while 41 percent say it does not.

Arizonans think Gov. Jan Brewer was right in vetoing controversial legislation seen as anti-gay, according to a new poll, with a plurality in the state also supporting same-sex marriage for the first time. Nearly three in four Arizona voters said they supported Brewer’s decision to veto the bill, with only 18 percent against it, according to a Public Policy Polling poll out Tuesday. A strong majority of each party, including Republicans, were behind her move.

Brady Williams and his five wives are the stars of a new reality series on TLC. The six Williams family members decided to go public with their story in order to dispel myths about polygamy, including about sexual relations between Brady and his wives. "All of America is having sex," Brady told HuffPost Live. "It's no big deal to answer [questions]. We're not perverted, we're not twisted. We're normal – we're just normal times five." However, Dean Gregory Alan Thornbury of the school of theology at Union University in Tennessee has been quick to point out that polygamy, even within...

A conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, writes that it's perhaps only a matter of time when same-sex marriage becomes legal in all 50 states, ruminating on what it might be like for those who believe in traditional marriage when that happens. The Supreme Court is likely to be "forced to acknowledge the logic of its own jurisprudence" on same-sex marriage and redefine marriage to include gay couples in all states, writes Douthat, former senior editor at The Atlantic, in an op-ed piece for the Times. This will finish the national debate but the country will remain divided, with...

Pope Francis has signed off on a married man's decision to join the priesthood in the Maronite Catholic Church. Deacon Wissam Akiki, of St. Louis, Mo., who is married and has a daughter, was expected to be ordained on Thursday night, in a the Maronite church. The sect of the Eastern Catholic Christianity originated in the fifth century in what is now modern-day Lebanon. While married priests are common within in the Maronite Catholic Church overseas, says St. Raymond's Chancellor Louis Peters, marriage for religious leaders was banned in the U.S. in the 1920s. According to the church's American spokesperson,...

I had a comment in my messages from an Observant Person who had the misfortune to read an article about Card. Kasper’s remarks on marriage in advance of the Synod.The Observant Person pulled a strange quote from Kasper via CNS: “he allowed for the possibility that in very specific cases the church could tolerate, though not accept, a second union.”? Huh? ”Tolerate though not accept”?There’s marriage and then there’s marriage*How can the Church tolerate what the Church cannot accept? There is a logical disconnect.What is this supposed to look like in concrete terms?Let’s take this into the parish. There are...

That is my paraphrase of this story, which contains some direct, blunt words from the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Just because many Catholics do not understand the Church’s teaching about the indissolubility of marriage, that does not mean the Church can change that teaching, said Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday — just days after the College of Cardinals held a two-day meeting to discuss the pastoral care of families — he said the widespread lack of understanding among Catholics about...

Several times since the Council, the enemies of truth and dogma have tried to force the issue of communion for "remarried" divorcees, a magnificent coup for, in the name of a false notion of "mercy", destroying the theology of two of the most fundamental Sacraments, Matrimony and Penance, and cheapen the highest Sacrament, the Most Holy Eucharist. They do not care that the matter has been firmly established throughout the History of the Church. They do not care that the Pope they now praise as "Santo, Santo" explained thoroughly why it could not happen, following a Synod, in Familiaris Consortio:

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis celebrated Mass in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta residence in the Vatican this morning. In remarks following the readings of the day, the Holy Father focused on the beauty of marriage and warned that the Church must accompany – not condemn – those who experience failure in married life. He explained that Christ is the Bridegroom of the Church, and therefore you cannot understand one without the Other. The Holy Father also warned against giving in to the temptation to entertain “special pleading” in questions regarding marriage. The Pharisees, he noted, present Jesus with...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Catholic Church needs to find a way to offer healing, strength and salvation to Catholics whose marriages have failed, who are committed to making a new union work and who long to do so within the church and with the grace of Communion, Cardinal Walter Kasper told the world's cardinals. Jesus' teaching on the indissolubility of sacramental marriage is clear, the retired German cardinal said, and it would harm individuals and the church to pretend otherwise. However, "after the shipwreck of sin, the shipwrecked person should not have a second boat at his or her...

After a week of wrangling over a Vatican decision to keep it secret, the German Catholic book publisher Herder announced today (Feb. 27) that on March 10 it would publish in book format Cardinal Walter Kasper’s two-hour keynote address at last week’s meeting of the College of Cardinals in Rome. Although Pope Francis had publicly praised Kasper’s speech on the theology of the family for its “profound theology” and “clear thinking,” the Vatican has so far only released a brief summary of the two-hour talk. Earlier this week, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, a member of the “G-8” Council of...

By the time Arizona Republican Gov. Jan Brewer announced that she was vetoing SB 1062, a bill that would have made it easier for business owners to turn away gay and lesbian customers, the religious right had already lost. ...................................................... There’s no chance that LGBT rights activists will give up that fight. While religious conservatives see the issue of allowing people to act according to their conscience, gay rights supporters see them as essentially demanding state sanction of gays and lesbians as a semi-pariah class against whom discrimination is less objectionable than it is against people on the basis of...

As Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer prepared to make a career-defining decision — whether to veto a bill that would free business owners to discriminate on the basis of their religious preferences — a letter arrived at her office early this week with a stern warning from some of the biggest names in the local business community. Signed by the heads of four Arizona business consortiums, with board members including officers of Bank of America, Intel and the Arizona Cardinals football franchise, the letter urged Brewer to strike down the measure known as S.B. 1062. The letter raised the prospect that...

Back in 2012, a full two years before conservatives insisted that religious freedom entailed the right to discriminate against gay people or gay spouses in both private and public workplaces, Republicans in Washington trotted out the same religious liberty line for the arguably narrower purpose of defending religious employers who wanted to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. ........................................................ It would be an infringement upon religious liberty to shutter a church that refused to marry interracial couples. But how many conservatives would go to bat for that church if the government rescinded its tax exemption? Would they...

A quarter-century ago, I was a legislative reporter in Arkansas assigned to a ceremony honoring Daisy Bates, the civil rights giant who led the Little Rock school integration effort in 1957. As Gov. Bill Clinton spoke and Bates beamed, a hunched old man limped into the room and leaned against a back wall. "Gov. Faubus?" I asked. ....................................................... Safety was his straw man. Religious liberty, like public safety, is a just cause, except when it's used to justify intolerance.

At the beginning of December, I announced in these pages and in a letter sent to all of our parishes and missions that our diocese would welcome any input from the faithful as they might wish to the questions sent by the Holy See at the request of Pope Francis on marriage and family life in our day. Over 6,800 people responded, taking time to fill out the survey, often taking significant additional time to add comments to the online version or by filling out the survey on paper and submitting it (written submissions were subsequently entered into the online...

The Alliance Defending Freedom is making its case to defend traditional marriage in Oklahoma, arguing same-sex marriage is bad for children. The Christian legal advocacy group said legalizing gay marriage would harm children, undermine society, and make traditional marriages unstable. Lawyers representing an Oklahoma clerk who refused to grant a marriage license to a same-sex couple cited courts and anthropologists in saying children are better off in a home with a mother and a father. They also added traditional couples would be less likely to marry, or stay together if marriage became a genderless institution not focused on procreation. Last...

I canÂ’t tell you where I was or who was there or when it happened. I donÂ’t want to add to this guyÂ’s humiliation, so I am keeping this vague and generic. I can simply tell you that, some time ago, I found myself in the same vicinity as another married couple. I certainly canÂ’t read their minds, and I donÂ’t know what goes on behind the scenes, all I know is that the husband couldnÂ’t seem to utter a single phrase that wouldnÂ’t provoke exaggerated eye-rolling from his wife. She disagreed with everything he said. She contradicted nearly every...

A group of conservative black pastors called Tuesday for Attorney General Eric Holder’s impeachment, saying the Obama administration has “sold out” with its support for gay marriage. The Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) is targeting Holder after concluding that going after the nation's first black president would be a losing battle. "If Obama was a white man, he would be impeached," said Rev. William Owens, the group’s founder and president. "Obama has been given a free pass to do what he pleases, but I don't give him a pass. I'm very black, been black all my life. He doesn't...