This Passage In The Pope's First Major Interview Has Made A Lot Of People Very Excited

Business Insider ^ | 09/21/2013 | Adam Taylor

[SeekAndFind]

Pope Francis can't seem to help but get good press recently, what with his humble new car, an endearing and sincere-seeming series of phone calls to random members of the public, public messages of tolerance, and the first papal selfie.

All that goodwill seems to have consolidated with his first long interview. The interview was conducted with Rev. Antonio Spadaro, editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, and translated in full by America Magazine.

It's certainly a long read, but to give you the gist, many people are picking up on this one passage in particular:

“The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow."

That message is likely to anger more conservative members of the clergy who had hoped that Pope Francis may use the interview to clarify his feelings on divisive issues like abortion, gays and contraception. Instead, he seems to be saying that the church shouldn't focus on those issues but instead look at the bigger picture of how to make the Catholic Church a more inclusive place.

[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

“I have no idea what he’s saying there. None. And that’s not good. It sounds like babble, that can be interpreted to mean just about anything.”

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I have also felt that his words are mostly babble, with no real clear meaning. The tendency for it, though, seems to be towards a universalism/liberal point of view.

[Viennacon]

It seems pretty clear that he wants the church to shy away from condemning sinful behavior. Unless the media is giving him the lost in translation treatment.

[Bayard]

As someone whose completed Seminary, and earned an STB in a pontifical degree...

MSM doesn’t know their ass end from their pie hole when it comes to understanding how the Catholic Church thinks.

Basically the Pope just stated that the dogmatic teaching of the Church is not a narrow but a broad teaching on all aspects of life. It has a richness to it which enlivens more than certain moral issues of life. Which is obvious to people who’ve studied and lived it carefully...He only wanted to emphasize the point that it is wrong to “only” apply the faith to narrow issues, because the dogmatic teaching encompasses far more.

To use a sports analogy, the rules of baseball tell us more than 3 strikes is equal to one out. It tells us that to reach home base you have to sequentially run from first, second and third base. It tells us everything we need to know about playing baseball...But if no one knows how to even throw a pitch or catch a ball...make sure you explain that too, not just the three strike rule.

That’s basically what he was saying (in far more eloquent language) about teaching the faith in that paragraph.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I think this article, posted elsewhere on FR, (and the commentary after it) pretty much summarizes the media's consternation:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3069378/posts

What Pope Francis is saying here, is that it's not enough to just repeat law, and more law, and yet again law; the Church must first, and always, evangelize, which means to draw people into the love of Christ our God.

The moral law doesn't mean much to people who see it as just an irrelevant restriction on their freedom, imposed on them by busybodies who are interlopers in their lives; but once the are attracted to Christ and begin to acquire the mind of Christ, gradually it makes sense to them: they grasp the horror of what they're doing, AND they have the grace which strengthens them to do good and avoid evil.

What the Pope said to the gynecologists is beautiful: that the unborn child has the face of Jesus Christ, the face of the Lord! That is not "shying away from condemning sinful behavior"; it is, rather, showing exactly why these things are to be condemned.