What does Pope Francis really think about homosexuality and sin?

The Catholic Herald ^ | January 30, 2023 | Gavin Ashenden

[ebb tide]

What does Pope Francis really think about homosexuality and sin?

There was a flurry of correspondence between the tireless LGBTQ+ activist Fr James Martin and Pope Francis on Saturday 27 January.

Fr Martin’s whole ministry is bound up by his desire to have the Catholic understanding of homosexuality changed.

The correspondence followed an interview Pope Francis gave to Associated Press in which the Pope emphasised that homosexuality was not a crime.

Fr Martin, an American Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, immediately wrote to the Pope asking for clarification, and was at once favoured with a reply.

The correspondence turned out to be interesting for a wider audience because it brought to the surface the underlying issues that drive the culture wars over sexuality.

During the interview with AP, Pope Francis had imagined a conversation in which while remarking that being gay was not a “crime”, someone might offer the objection that “being gay was a sin”, to which the pope replied: “it’s also a sin to lack charity to one another”.

In being asked to clarity his views by Fr Martin, he wrote the following in his explicatory letter:

“When I said it is a sin, I was simply referring to Catholic moral teaching, which says that every sexual act outside of marriage is a sin. Of course, one must also consider the circumstances, which may decrease or eliminate fault.”

And these two statements together have created something of a stir. On the one hand Pope Francis has commendably been re-stating Catholic ethical teaching by saying that every sexual act outside marriage is a sin. On the other hand, however, he has, somewhat ambiguously, drawn in another idea which when linked to the public discussion about homosexual love, may work to undermine Catholic teaching.

Austin Ivereigh certainly thought the latter. In a hasty re-tweet of Fr Martin’s correspondence, he triumphantly proclaimed:

“This is how church teaching develops. The unfortunate phrase “intrinsically disordered”, source of so much hurt and misunderstanding and de facto abandoned long ago, is now officially junked.”

What had he understood Pope Francis to mean?

To pick up the closet semiotics one needs to know what the argument from the homosexual and progressive pressure groups is.

On the one hand Christian ethical teaching has emphasised the given categories of moral and social activity. And that’s what the pope is referring to when he confidently reiterates the very simple Christian ethical position that in order for sex to be holy, it must take place only within a Christian marriage.

Since homosexual erotic appetite can only be satisfied between two members of the same sex, outside of marriage, it lacks biological and spiritual order. It is therefore “intrinsically disordered”.

The spiritual analysis is no more nuanced than the biological reality – the needs of the soul are mismatched in much the same unambiguous way as the genitals are mismatched.

But the progressive lobby has taken an important ethical caveat and turned it into a new and superior ethical law.

The principle is the one Pope Francis is referring to when he says that culpability or fault is affected by the context: “one must also consider the circumstances, which may decrease or eliminate fault.” This “elimination of fault” is quite some antidote to the understanding of sin. It might even be thought remove it.

The usual way to explain what is meant by “context matters” is to imagine a situation where a child is hungry or starving and he steals a loaf of bread. The injustice and the hunger mitigate the blame for the theft. Maybe they even justify it? Ethicists argue over such (usually hypothetical) things. And there is clearly an important caveat to be made. We are not automatons living inside a mechanical ethical system.

So those who wish to change the Church’s teaching on sex offer the following argument: what if the quality of sexual affection between two people who are not married to each other might justify their actions? What if, for example, they reach such levels of ethically impressive intimacy, tenderness, need, affection, fidelity and permanence, that the merits accumulated by all this virtuous emotion outweigh the “sin”?

To drive this home, it might be suggested that two homoerotically affectionate people have kind, generous and perhaps even a charming sexual intimacy; and if this is set alongside another (hypothetical) straight couple who are going through a difficult patch and whose sexual attraction is low, poor, unsympathetic, unsuccessful and badly-matched, then surely the gay sexual intimacy is ethically superior to the straight and rather more incompetent or unsympathetic intimacy? Is it not even “more loving”?

But immediately we can see that the highest value in this argument is “what kind of loving sex are you having?”. And that is very much a prime concern of our culture. This is the new gold standard of ethics; and not, “what is the category of relationship that you are in?”.

But is the integrity of the idea of a spiritual category undermined or reconfigured by the quality of sexual affection and intimacy (if such things can actually be judged)?

How can we test the growing progressive claim that the category does not matter as much as the quality of the “loving intimacy” expressed between a hypothetical couple?

What would we say to a brother and sister whose sexual relationship took place outside marriage and was incestuous? Does the quality of their “love” (remember always the mantra that “love is love”) outweigh the fact that this is incest and not marriage?

What about the “minor attracted” step-father (previously known as a paedophile) who wants to express his love to his young step-daughter with a degree of sincere, intense sexual affection and with a terrifying degree of permanence?

Let’s take the argument in another direction. Let us say two unmarried people feel such an overflowing torrent of loving sexual and intimate affection that they feel its integrity requires them to invite a third person into the intimacy – what is known nowadays as turning a couple into a “thruple”?

The argument that context (or intention) may remove all blame, and by implication sin, will allow the erosion of the monogamous heterosexual couple.

By extending biological marriage of man to woman to same sex-couples on the basis of the intensity and authenticity of their romantic feelings for each other, the category of marriage is changed, and combined with the “elimination of fault”, the concept of sex outside marriage being a sin disappears.

Both James Martin and Austin Ivereigh are confident that when Pope Francis said “every sexual act outside of marriage is a sin. Of course, one must also consider the circumstances, which may decrease or eliminate fault,”that this “elimination of fault” reflects the progressive claim that the quality of sexual intimacy outweighs the belief that the category of marriage is non-negotiable in being able to tell what is sin in God’s eyes and what isn’t.

Whatever it was that Pope Francis meant when he insisted that “the circumstances may eliminate fault”, the progressives insist he intended to and is changing Catholic teaching on sex, marriage and sin.

(Photograph of Fr James Martin: Vatican News)

[ebb tide]

Ping

[The Louiswu]

I’m catholic and I don’t care what he thinks. Not My Pope.

[Mark]

bkmk

[mass55th]

Can he provide the definition of a man, and women?

[dsrtsage]

Pope satanfelcher thinks whatever his lord and master soros tells him to think

[TangoLimaSierra]

He was heard to say; “Well, I ain’t agin it”.

[GrumpyOldGuy]

ANTI pope. Not the pope. Never has been, never will be. Evil cannot be the Pope.

[for-q-clinton]

He prefers it when it’s a young boy.

[daniel1212]

The principle is the one Pope Francis is referring to when he says that culpability or fault is affected by the context: “one must also consider the circumstances, which may decrease or eliminate fault.” This “elimination of fault” is quite some antidote to the understanding of sin. It might even be thought remove it. The usual way to explain what is meant by “context matters” is to imagine a situation where a child is hungry or starving and he steals a loaf of bread. The injustice and the hunger mitigate the blame for the theft. Maybe they even justify it? Ethicists argue over such (usually hypothetical) things.

Poor analogy, but an adulterer who does not have much of a developed conscience nor moral light but treats his wife and mistresses with kindness is not as evil and culpable as as a PK who abuses his wife, but in no way is either justified.

And unlike killing, stealing (such as in war), homosexual relations are one of the acts that is unconditionally only condemned.

Bergoglio is holding back the sword of Truth (not that he is even qualified to use it) and implicitly helping the homosexual BORG, which insists, "Lower your shields and surrender your mind. We will conform your biological sexual distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”

[ebb tide]

And unlike killing, stealing (such as in war), homosexual relations are one of the acts that is unconditionally only condemned.

I concur.

[Darksheare]

He’s an antipope, he partakes.

[NWFree]

I have enough sense not to want to know what this slimeball pope thinks

I don’t want to know

Call me when he’s dead