Except not too long ago he stated that “it was not necessary to talk about these issues all of the time”.
Guess he’s learning that as the elected leader of the Catholic Church, you kinda have to.
And how right he was about that! You will remember the context of this statement: Pope Francis explained that "The church's pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently."
The key word here is "disjointed." If we try to teach these life-giving principles in a fragmentary way, not showing how they are related to a much larger, holistic vision of the holiness of God--- why then, it's just a bunch of incomprehensible shalt-nots.
And the key, as Pope Francis said --- in that same talk --- "The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you."
If we neglect the proclamation of Christ, people will brush off disjointed "shalt-nots." They must first be drawn to Christ, our Life-giver,our Savior.
As in today's Gospel!, Christ first said to Zacchaeus, "Today I will come and dine with you." AFTER that, Zacchaeus said, "I will give half of my property to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone, I will repay them fourfold." Zacchaeus had to encounter the love of Christ FIRST. Then he was eager, he was joyful to fulfill the requirements of the moral law.
Pope Lauds Moral Teachings
November 18, 2014
Bill Donohue comments on two recent statements by Pope Francis:
On November 15, in an address before the Association of Italian Catholic Doctors, Pope Francis took direct aim at those touting “quality of life” arguments. “There is no human life that is more sacred than another...just as there is no human life qualitatively more significant than another,” he said. Thus did he reject the grounds upon which the doctor-assisted suicide movement is promoted.
The pope also spoke of a “false compassion” which promotes scientific ways to “produce” a child. Specifically, he said, “We are living in a time of experimentation with life. But a bad experiment. Making children rather than accepting them as a gift, as I said. Playing with life.”
Importantly, the pope defended the Church’s teaching on abortion on scientific grounds, not on religious or philosophical ones. Abortion, he said, is a “scientific problem because there is a human life there, and it is not lawful to take out a human life to solve a problem.”
On November 17, at a Vatican colloquium on “The Complementarity of Man and Woman in Marriage,” the pope stressed the complementarity of “the two sexes,” and how “each man and woman brings his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage and to the formation of their children.” Similarly, he said, “Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child’s development and emotional maturity.”
Notice the pope did not speak about “gender,” or socially learned sex roles, but of the “sexes,” meaning nature-produced differences. This was intentional. That is why he did not say that children have a right to grow up in a family of two adults, no matter how loving: he was exact in citing the need for children to have “a father and a mother.”
Don’t look for the media, and some in Catholic circles, to punctuate these remarks by the Holy Father. Which is why we did.