Pope Francis with New Ways Ministry, October 2024.
Posted on 01/14/2025 4:30:14 PM PST by ebb tide
Pope Francis with New Ways Ministry, October 2024.
Expanding his defense of the 2023 document approving blessing of same-sex couples, Pope Francis attested that such blessings are for “people” but “not the relationships.”
“It is the people who are blessed, not the relationships,” said Pope Francis of the blessings authorized by the controversial document Fiducia Supplicans.
Francis’ comments, found in his newly released memoir Hope, expand on his prior defense of the highly controversial document he signed, which stated that priests could offer blessings to couples of the same-sex.
“Receptiveness, and certainly not relativism, nor any change of doctrine, is the spirit and heart of Fiducia supplicans,” said Francis.
Released in December 2023, the document caused wide-spread consternation throughout the entire Church, and notable numbers of bishops rejecting the text. Demonstrating such resistance, emeritus prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) Cardinal Gerhard Müller wrote that “blessings” of homosexual couples constitute “blasphemy” and that the document is “self-contradictory.”
Indeed, only two years prior in 2021 the CDF stated clearly that the Church does not have “power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex.” The CDF wrote that it is “not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.”
But according to Francis in his memoir Hope, Fiducia’s approval of same-sex blessings “arises from the wish not to ascribe one situation or one condition to the entire life of those who seek to be illuminated and accompanied with a blessing.”
“Everyone in the Church is invited, including people who are divorced, including people who are homosexual, including people who are transgender,” he added, drawing on his now regular encounters with groups of transgender individuals at the Vatican. “The first time that a group of transgender people came to the Vatican, they left in tears, moved because I had taken their hands, had kissed them … As if I had done something exceptional for them. But they are daughters of God!”
It is unclear if Francis was referring to biological women, or men who live as “transgender women,” when he made this remark.
Francis has made similar defenses of Fiducia Supplicans on previous occasions, leading commentators to question how a differentiation can be made between blessing two people who present themselves for a blessing together as a couple, and blessing the couple as a couple.
The Catholic Church teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.” The Catechism is very clear that homosexual activity can never be approved, and repeats that “[h]omosexual persons are called to chastity.”
But for Francis, such blessing of homosexual couples is an example of “pastoral open-mindedness”:
It is strange that nobody worries about the blessing of an entrepreneur who exploits people, and this is a grave sin, or about someone who pollutes our common home, while there’s a public scandal if the pope blesses a divorced woman or a homosexual.
Opposition to pastoral open-mindedness often uncovers these hypocrisies.
Shortly before Fiducia Supplicans’ release, Francis issued another document with his CDF prefect, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, about transgender individuals. In an apparent violation of canon law and established Church teaching, the pair wrote that transgender people who had undergone a “sex change” could be godparents at baptism.
READ: Pope Francis says ‘trans’ people can be godparents, homosexual ‘parents’ can have children baptized
Alluding to this text, Francis wrote in Hope that transgender individuals “can receive baptism on the same conditions as other believers and can perform the responsibilities of godparents on the same conditions as others, and likewise be witnesses to a marriage.”
“No provision of canonical law forbids it,” he claimed.
READ: Pope Francis’ ‘transsexual’ baptisms document is even more radical than it seems
Decrying laws against homosexuality, which are particularly prevalent in African nations, Francis said that homosexuality “is a human fact” to which the Church must not respond “faintheartedly.”
The Pope also appeared to suggest that there is no need for conversion away from the homosexual lifestyle, since God “loves them as they are”:
God the Father loves them with the same unconditional love, He loves them as they are, and He accompanies them in the same way that He does with all of us, being close by, merciful, and tender.
In 2016, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia infamously contained a passage allowing for the divorced and “re-married” to approach and receive Holy Communion. After widespread consternation and requests for clarification from leading lay theologians and cardinals, Francis then affirmed to the bishops of Buenos Aires that this was indeed the intention of the document and that there were “no other interpretations.”
This was condemned by theologians and then the four dubia cardinals as being in direct opposition to the Catholic faith.
READ: EXCLUSIVE: New cardinal says banning divorced, ‘re-married’ from Communion an ‘enormous injustice’
Writing in Hope, Francis decried “resistance” to the text as based on “inadequate knowledge or some form of hypocrisy.”
He described the document as simply opening “the doors for new pastoral challenges in regard to the family and that note on the possibility of divorced people having access to the sacraments.”
“Sexual sins,” he said, “tend to cause more of an outcry from some people. But they are really not the most serious. They are human sins, of the flesh.”
READ: What motivates Pope Francis’ attempts to normalize homosexual relationships?
On the contrary, he continued, “the most serious … are the sins that have more ‘angelicity,’ that dress themselves in another guise: pride, hatred, falsehood, fraud, abuse of power.”
Though Francis has claimed that Fiducia Supplicans and Amoris Laetitia “opened the doors” of the Church, they have led to numerous Catholics – lay and clerical – to accuse the Pontiff of endangering the faith and of promoting heresy. Notwithstanding this, Francis has remained committed to his agenda as he now approaches his twelfth anniversary of being pope.
Ping
So, I guess all sinners are fine “ just the way they are “. Well, that was easy.
God does not love anyone “as they are.” But He loves us enough to send His Son to cleanse us of our sin.
He is probably one of them.
> Greeks thought Constantinople would last forever. Italians think the Vatican will last forever. <
Excellent comment!
I once read an article about the fall of the western Roman Empire. The author listed all the usual reasons. Corruption, debasement of currency, etc.
Then he said what you said. The Roman Empire was thought to be eternal. So there was no need for any reforms. The Roman Empire was eternal. Until it wasn’t.
By the way, the United States is today in the grip of that same mentality. Will Trump be able to change that? I wouldn’t bet on it.
God loves all sinners the way we are, but he loves us too much to let us stay that way.
That's what makes it "Sin", is that it offends God!
This is about actual behavior, NOT temptation.
“God loves you the way you are, so go ahead and molest that altar boy.”
Basically what he’s saying.
The “pope” might try reading the Bible.
This heretical communist POS needs to be put down like a rabid dog...
It will take a hundred years for the Catholic church to recover from this satanic bastard’s grip...
The problem lies with the College of Cardinals. Francis has appointed the great majority of the voting Cardinals.
So when Francis goes, it will probably be a case of “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
Then rinse and repeat.
But I am not without hope. Karol Wojtyła came out of nowhere to become John Paul II. So you never know.
Bless his heart.
The Church has always taught that sodomy is one of the sins that cries out to Heaven. It matters not if a Judas sits on the throne of Peter. God will not be mocked. Lord have mercy on us all.
“So, I guess all sinners are fine ‘ just the way they are ‘. Well, that was easy.”
Not exactly, but say it the deceitful way:
“God loves all sinners.”
It becomes deceitful when the necessary condition is omitted: “However, sinners who do not sincerely repent and ask forgiveness will still spend eternity in the raging fires of Hell.”
The Pope is apparently playing word games with his deviant friends. You know, like Satan does. Or maybe the media is mischaracterizing what he said.
So tired of the same old s—t from Bergoglio. The man came in with the agenda of remaking the Catholic Church in the image of liberal protestantism. He has not wavered, nor evolved nor pivoted one bit in 12 years. For someone who obsessively bashes the “rigid,” well, he’s expert. A true one-trick pony.
Thanks Mario, but I’d rather hear that from God’s lips, not from the lips of a heretic.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.