This is a welcome and serious change in
tone from the Church and surely heralds a steady return to the church’s core mission
of promoting the universal teachings of Jesus.
These are all issues that gain traction in the press and bring out faux
controversy as if the core teaching of the church might be even
negotiable. Seeing them off eliminates a
huge self-inflicted annoyance and sends such debates back to the scholars where
they belong
It is telling that all those churches that
ultimately succumbed to popular opinion are largely in serious decline. Religion is a matter of faith and personal
spirituality and never subject to public opinion. A church forgetting that does so at its own
peril.
This actually clears the air and allows the
Church to refocuses.
Pope Says Church Is ‘Obsessed’ With Gays,
Abortion and Birth Control
Published:
September 19, 2013
Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis
sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic church on Thursday with the
publication of his remarks that the church had grown “obsessed” with abortion,
gay marriage and contraception, and that he had chosen not to talk about those
issues despite recriminations from critics.
His surprising comments came in a lengthy interview in
which he criticized the church for putting dogma before love, and for
prioritizing moral doctrines over serving the poor and marginalized. He
articulated his vision of an inclusive church, a “home for all” — which is a
striking contrast with his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, the doctrinal
defender who envisioned a smaller, purer church.
Francis told the interviewer, a fellow Jesuit: “It is not
necessary to talk about these issues all the time. 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.
“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued,
“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 pope’s interview did not change church doctrine or
policies, but it instantly changed its tone. His words evoked gratitude and
hope from many liberal Catholics who had felt left out in the cold during the
papacies of Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II, which together lasted
35 years. Some lapsed Catholics suggested on social media a return to the
church, and leaders of gay rights and gay Catholic groups called on bishops to
abandon their fight against gay marriage.
But it left conservative and traditionalist Catholics, and
those who have devoted themselves to the struggles against abortion, gay
marriage and artificial contraception, on the defensive, though some cast it as
nothing new.
“Nobody should try to use the words of the pope to minimize
the urgent need to preach and teach about abortion,” said the Rev. Frank
Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, who said he spoke Thursday about
the “priority of the abortion issue” at a Vatican conference.
The interview with Francis was conducted by the Rev.
Antonio Spadaro, editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, an Italian Jesuit journal whose content is
approved by the Vatican. Francis, the first Jesuit to become a pope, agreed to
grant the interview after requests from Father Spadaro and the editors of
America, a Jesuit magazine based in New York.
Father Spadaro conducted the interview during three
meetings in August in the pope’s spartan quarters in Casa Santa Marta, the
Vatican guesthouse, where Francis said he had chosen to live because it is less
isolated than the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace. “I cannot live
without people,” Francis told Father Spadaro.
The interview, kept under wraps for weeks by the Jesuits,
was released simultaneously on Thursday morning by 16 Jesuit journals
around the world. Francis personally reviewed the Italian transcript, and it
was translated by a team into English, said the Rev. James Martin, an editor at
large of America.
“We have a great pope,” said Father Spadaro in a phone
interview from his office, surrounded by Italian journalists. “There is a big
vision, not a big shift. His big vision is to see the church in the middle of
the persons who need to be healed. It is in the middle of the world.”
The pope’s words are likely to have repercussions in a
church whose bishops and priests in many countries, including the United
States, have often seemed to make combating abortion, gay marriage and
contraception their top public policy priorities. Francis said that those
teachings have to be presented in a larger context.
“I see the church as a field hospital after battle,”
Francis said. “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high
cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal his
wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.”
From the outset of his papacy in March, Francis, who is 76,
has chosen to use the global spotlight to focus on the church’s mandate to
serve the poor and oppressed. He has washed the feet of juvenile prisoners,
visited a center for refugees and hugged disabled pilgrims at his audiences.
His pastoral presence and humble gestures have made him wildly popular among
American Catholics, according to a recent Pew survey.
But there has been a low rumble of discontent from some
Catholic advocacy groups, and even from some bishops, who have taken note of
his silence on abortion and gay marriage. This month, Bishop Thomas Tobin of
Providence, R.I., told his diocesan newspaper that he was “a little bit
disappointed in Pope Francis” because he had not spoken about abortion. “Many
people have noticed that,” he said.
The interview is the first time Francis has explained the
reasoning behind both his actions and omissions. He also expanded on the
comments he made about homosexuality in July, on an airplane returning to Rome
from Rio de Janeiro, where he had celebrated World Youth Day. In a remark then
that produced headlines worldwide, the new pope said, “Who am I to judge?” At the time, some questioned whether he was
referring only to gays in the priesthood, but in this interview he made clear
that he had been speaking of gay men and lesbians in general.
“A person once asked me, in a provocative
manner, if I approved of homosexuality,” he told Father Spadaro. “I replied
with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he
endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this
person?’ We must always consider the person.”
The interview also serves to present the pope as a human
being, who loves Mozart and Dostoyevsky and his grandmother, and whose favorite
film is Fellini’s “La
Strada.”
Francis said some had assumed he was an “ultraconservative”
because of his reputation when he served as the superior of his Jesuit province
in Argentina. He said that he was made superior at the “crazy” young age of 36,
and that his leadership style was too authoritarian.
“But I have never been a right-winger,” he said. “It was my
authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.”
Now, Francis said, he prefers a more consultative
leadership style. He has appointed an advisory group of eight cardinals, a step
he said was recommended by the cardinals at the conclave that elected him. They
were demanding reform of the Vatican bureaucracy, he said, adding that from the
eight, “I want to see that this is a real, not ceremonial, consultation.”
The pope said he has found it “amazing” to see complaints
about “lack of orthodoxy” flowing into the Vatican offices in Rome from
conservative Catholics around the world. They ask the Vatican to investigate or
discipline their priests, bishops or nuns. Such complaints, he said, “are
better dealt with locally,” or else the Vatican offices risk becoming
“institutions of censorship.”
Asked what it means for him to “think with the church,” a
phrase used by the Jesuit founder St. Ignatius, Francis said that it did not
mean “thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”
“This church with which we should be thinking is the home
of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected
people,” he said. “We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a
nest protecting our mediocrity.”
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