‘The impact of the conversation in the church sparked by Francis on homosexuality cannot be underestimated. By talking about the humanity of gay and lesbian Catholics, Pope Francis is openly recognizing them as children of God. After centuries of demonization, that’s a revolutionary act that can’t be undone.’
‘Just as the Catholic Church failed to stem or even acknowledge the horror of abuses caused by priests over the last century until recently, the failure to create new avenues for families of all kinds will continue to fracture the beliefs of Catholics in this country in their papal leadership.’
Pope Francis keeps stirring things up in ways that people notice, whether or not they belong to the Roman Catholic Church. He recently released a 256-page document that laid out his views on love, divorce, remarriage and how the institution treats them.
One of our readers, Bob O’Connor, was enthusiastic about what he read: “‘The Joy of Love’ is certainly a great move forward for the Catholic Church. Being a cradle Catholic, I sure welcome this exhortation, because it clearly encourages all to follow Jesus with Love and not from fear of “fire and brimstone”! Having been exposed to Catholic education for 16 years I felt so guilty about so many things — impure thoughts, eating meat on Fridays, taking any food or liquid (even water) after midnight before the next morning’s Mass and Holy Communion, etc. Not to mention the antiquated church’s teachings on birth control, gays and lesbians, etc. What a wonderful message the Pope has sent to me — an 85-year-old man looking forward to eternal life—the Joy of Love for all eternity.”
Another reader, Jim Peth, was a little less impressed: “The Pope needs to read God’s Word in the Bible. No where in the Bible does it say divorced, single parents, gays or those shacking up can’t take the Lord Supper/Holy Communion. The Bible does not refer to a person’s examing his or her daily walk with Jesus so as to determine worthiness to partake of Communion. The Bible does say if we eat and drink in a unworthy manner taking communion — we eat and drink judgment on ourselves.”
What were others saying about the pope’s words? Today we offer commentary from several pundits writing in major publications. What do you think? Email rrollins@coxohio.com. — Ron Rollins
Pope Francis keeps on changing the tone of the conversation
From Jonathan Capehart, at the Washington Post: If the Catholic Church is an enormous battleship slowly navigating humanity's moral seas for two millennia, then Pope Francis is its new commander trying to narrowly shift its course. "Joy of Love," the pontiff's 256-page apostolic exhortation on the family, is not a wholesale course correction. But his tone and words on divorce, family structure and the treatment of lesbians and gay men in the church are a marked departure from what we're used to hearing from the Vatican.
Anyone disappointed that the pope and the synod of bishops who worked on the paper did not change the church’s stance on divorce or the definition of marriage was naive at best. No way that was going to happen. But ever since Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis I in 2013, the credo of his papacy has been inclusion, dignity and respect for people whose lives find them outside of the strict tenets of the church.
Divorce is so abhorrent to Francis that he writes, “Divorce is an evil and the increasing number of divorces is very troubling.” It is noteworthy that is the only thing singled out as “evil” in the entire paper. But … “divorced people who have not remarried, and often bear witness to marital fidelity,” the pope writes, “ought to be encouraged to find in the Eucharist the nourishment they need to sustain them in their present state of life.” Francis added this about the remarried, “It is important that the divorced who have entered a new union should be made to feel part of the Church.” The overarching message is that life happens and the church should be there for its flock. …
Now, to the gays. Pope Benedict XVI called homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil” in a 2005 paper on priests with “homosexual tendencies.” When he was asked about gay priests while flying back from Brazil in July 2013, Pope Francis said, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” That remark, plus his compassionate remarks in a magazine interview later that year, cemented his reputation as a pontiff who loved all and welcomed all. …
What the “Joy of Love” does not do — unsurprisingly — is give its blessing to same-sex marriage. … Yet the impact of the conversation in the church sparked by Francis on homosexuality cannot be underestimated. By talking about the humanity of gay and lesbian Catholics, Pope Francis is openly recognizing them as children of God. After centuries of demonization, that’s a revolutionary act that can’t be undone.
This doesn’t go far enough, and really changes little
From Megan Sweas, at the Los Angeles Times: When my parents went to schedule my older brother's baptism at a Catholic church, the priest told them their baby was a bastard. Because my parents were married in the Episcopal Church, their child was, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, illegitimate.
The bastard comment became a family joke, and my father eventually brought his Episcopalian-baptized kids back to the Catholic Church. Yet, it’s hard for me to ignore the fact that the Catholic Church still doesn’t see my parents’ relationship as valid even after 38 years of marriage. To be an American Catholic today is to live with a tension between church teachings and the beliefs born of one’s daily reality.
With Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), the apostolic exhortation on marriage and family life published last week, Pope Francis asks modern Catholics to stay in this tension — and for the church to make room for them. Moral laws are not “stones to throw at people’s lives,” he writes, opening the door for pastors to find a way for those in “irregular situations” like remarriage to participate fully in their faith.
Passages read more like a contemporary marriage manual than an apostolic exhortation. He reflects on Paul’s definition (“Love is kind…”) and reminds couples to schedule dates to be alone together. “We find it difficult to present marriage more as a dynamic path to personal development and fulfillment than as a lifelong burden,” Francis writes.
But the pope also insists on traditional gender roles and admonishes against sex, birth control and same-sex marriage.
That approach may not be enough to stem the decline in the church membership.
Today the lack of welcome in the church is often subtler than calling a baby a bastard. Couples planning weddings, for instance, complain that parishes care only about money and paperwork. They lie about cohabiting to avoid being lectured. If Francis could make pastors more welcoming, it would be a significant change. Yet fewer couples want church weddings in the first place: The number of weddings in Catholic churches is today less than 40 percent of what it was in 1970.
According to the Pew Research Center, one-quarter of U.S. Catholics have gone through divorce, and 44 percent have lived with a romantic partner without being married. Fewer than half of American Catholics agree with the church that homosexual behavior, remarriage without an annulment, cohabitation and contraception are sins. …
A drastic change in doctrine couldn’t have been expected. Francis leads a global church, and by empowering local clergy to discern individual situations, he avoids fracturing it over rules. But for Catholics on the edge of the church already, the progress made by “The Joy of Love” may be too little.
Softened approach to divorce welcome, but stigma remains
From Michelle Welden, at Religion News Service: Pope Francis made a leap towards healing the stigma (of divorce) last week in his much awaited 256-page paper, "Amoris Laetitia," or "The Joy of Love," with a softened approach to divorce and remarriage. "Let us remember that a small step in the midst of great human limitations can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties," Francis wrote.
It is comforting language, but hardly revolutionary.
His efforts to address the nuances of human relationships fail to acknowledge the complexities of marriages that end and why, or marriages that never begin. It is a blatant failure, as well, to hold to the church’s hard-line opposition to same sex marriages. Francis’ recent pronouncement does not erase the embedded hurt that has been caused by decades of punitive references to families that do not fit the happy family mold of one father, one mother.
In 2014, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, 1.6 million children were born to unmarried women, or 40 percent of all births. More than a third of children under 18 in this country live in households with a single parent.
These families are not broken.
Just as the Catholic Church failed to stem or even acknowledge the horror of abuses caused by priests over the last century until recently, the failure to create new avenues for families of all kinds will continue to fracture the beliefs of Catholics in this country in their papal leadership.
I was divorced in 1996, and received an annulment that same year. I went through the process because my mother and the parish priest told me I needed to. I remember it involved a hefty payment, hours of meetings with an assigned counselor and a dissertation-worthy set of paperwork outlining the reasons for the annulment. It was granted, but not without a formal protest from my former husband. Ironically, he remarried shortly after our divorce.
Years later, I have no plans to remarry, and I am not sure if I ever will. What I do wish for is an annulment of the pain caused by clergy who in the name of Jesus have declared for years that because I chose to raise my sons alone following a doomed marriage, that we are all broken. That I have sinned.
Bless me, Father, but that is a legacy I find hard to forgive.
Francis connects well with people, but what’s his lasting legacy?
From Joanna Moorhead, at The Guardian: Connecting with people really matters: but unfortunately for Francis, whose Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love) urges compassion for all, it's not the most important part of being a pope. Much more far-reaching and important than his style is his substance – because when his pontificate is over, and he is dead and gone, it's the way he's changed the fabric of the church, and not just the way it looks, that will live on.
The reality about the pope’s statement is that it does in words exactly what Francis does in the flesh. It speaks the language ordinary people speak, and it acknowledges the reality of ordinary people’s lives. Most of us don’t live in some rarefied holy bubble; many of us aren’t living perfect lives; and Amoris Laetitia acknowledges this.
Whether we’re Catholics or not, many of us are divorced or gay or in relationships that the church, in its inimitable wisdom, would deem “irregular”; many of us have done things the church at least frowns upon, and maybe condemns outright. The thing we all know, or the thing we should all know, is that no one – no one, whoever they are and whatever they do, or have done, or for that matter mean to do – is outside the remit of God’s love: that’s the simple truth the pope believes. So Francis, who seems acutely and impressively conscious of this fact, is happy to get down and dirty with the rest of us. He’s a sinner too, he says. No one of us is better than another. Who, he seems to be saying, is perfect in this world? Not me.
So he’s talking the talk and he’s walking the walk: but is he actually changing anything as regards church doctrine on people who have divorced and remarried, for example? Not really: the document eschews new rules in favour of passing the buck to individual parishes and individual priests and bishops. They must look at the rights and wrongs of particular cases, where there is some “irregularity,” and in that word much-used in Catholic circles, they must “discern” what is right.
It all sounds rather depressingly like business as usual to most of us Catholics. We all know that the so-called faithful follow their noses on church teaching, and make up their own minds on what is and isn’t morally right, or sinful. Time isn’t on Pope Francis’s side in any respect: the world has changed, the Catholic population has changed, and what we need are proper, nailed-down markers of that to drag the church at least into the 20th century on issues such as same-sex relationships, divorce, and children born outside marriage.
And that, it seems, is precisely what Pope Francis is unable to provide. It’s an odd paradox that this is a man known for being infallible, and infallibility suggests power; but the truth is that the pope’s biggest power is to change the way the papacy looks, not the way the Catholic church actually operates in terms of its rules and doctrines.
Because whatever Francis wants to change, the reality for him is that he is surrounded by a deeply conservative institution run largely by self-serving bureaucratic men, most of them cut off from the reality of people’s lives –from lives with which Francis himself, impressively, still seems to manage to connect.
And the bottom line is this: if he doesn’t manage to overturn those Vatican bureaucrats, it’s all froth on the cappuccino, at a time when the church desperately needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
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