Lora wrote:
While it is important to find ways to welcome gay Catholics, gay marriage is still not on the church’s agenda, Francis said.
Let’s see the actual quote. I’ll bet the Pope didn’t use the word “gay,” and I’ll bet he didn’t mean that sodomy is the same as heterosexual intercourse. Nor did he change the teaching that all sex outside marriage is a sin.
In which case, the article is a lie and the author has committed a sin of omission. This means that the writer cannot be trusted as a journalist. Which means she is not a journalist.
Also, I’ll wager that she is a lesbian.
What he said was, “nobody talked about homosexual marriage in the Synod. What we did speak about is when a family has a homosexual son or daughter, how it educates him or her, how it gets along, how to help this family to get along in this somewhat unusual situation. That is, they spoke in the Synod about the family and homosexual people in relation to their families, because it is a reality that we often meet in the confessional: a father and mother who have a son or daughter like that.”
“It happened to me several times in Buenos Aires. And, well, we have to see how to help that father or mother to accompany that son or daughter. This is what was discussed in the Synod. It was for that reason that someone spoke about positive elements in the first draft. But was still a relative draft.”
So, no, he never used the word “gay,” although he did seem to say that homosexuality is sort of a given and that there is no moral choice or choice of any kind involved, which is exactly what people who define themselves as “gay” are claiming. For him, it’s just a problem in teaching the family how to support (”accompany”) this person.
And it is true that the Synod never discussed “gay marriage,” and I believe the Pope himself has rejected the concept a couple of times recently. Also, he did not say that “gay marriage” is “still” not being discussed, but merely that it wasn’t discussed at that time. So you can take that any way you want, I suppose. But the writer of this piece did take liberties with his words and exaggerated the points that she liked.
BTW, he also proclaimed in the interview that his homilies and interviews are his “magisterio” (teaching), which accounts for the poor and confusing quality of the latter.
Personally, I think he’s basically a rather slippery small-country “progressive” with a massive ego and an extremely authoritarian concept of the Papacy which allows him to think he can simply enforce anything that is his whim at a given moment. I don’t think he can, and in fact one of the things asked by the interviewer was how he had managed to stir up so much opposition so fast. His answer was evasive, and then ended up referring to anyone who even raised any questions or appeared to defend traditional doctrine as being one of the “stick in the muds,” and that he was praying for the Spirit to convert them.
Like all progressives, he genuinely thinks he means well and that his “inconsciencia” (translated as “lack of awareness” in the official translation, but which can be and usually is translated as “recklessness,” “negligence” or “heedlessness”) is a good thing because he really means well and God really is working through him. Maybe He is - God does write straight with crooked lines, as we all know - and this has certainly made many of us analyze and reaffirm our adherence to the Church, despite it all, and the traditional doctrines and teachings of the Church.