Things Are Happening, Maybe


I will disclose my biases up front--I am an unabashed fanboy of Pope Francis.  He has done and said everything I could have reasonably hoped for in the new pope, from his rejection of the over-the-top material trappings of the Papacy to his low-key demeanor to his efforts to reach out to other religions and disaffected groups.  I love all of it.
In that context, today has been an interesting news day for Pope Francis.

First, he gave an impromptu news conference to the journalists traveling with him in the back of the plane on the way home from World Youth Day in Rio.  By all reports, it was 100% unstructured and off-the-cuff.  John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, probably the top US reporter on church topics, provided a summary of the conversation.

The headline-grabber was the Pope's comments on homosexuals.

Two pieces of context are needed here.  In 2005, Pope Benedict signed an order which officially established as church policy that homosexual men are unsuitable for ordination to the priesthood.  Prior to this (or, really, prior to the beginning of the sex abuse crisis) the position was that sexual orientation did not impact one's ability to be a priest, since all priests are required to be celibate.  Despite this ruling, everyone knows that many priests are gay, and it is a standard trope of the more conspiracy minded conservative commentators that these gay priests form a "fifth column" within the Church.  These conspiracy theories seemed to become more substantive in the run-up to Benedict's resignation, where reports surfaced of a "Gay Mafia" that was engaging in various nefarious activities.

So, Pope Francis's comments today are significant for two reasons.  One, he seems to downplay the whole concept of the "Gay Mafia"--"There's a lot of talk about the gay lobby, but I've never seen it on the Vatican ID card." But then he drops this: When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn't be marginalized. The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem ... they're our brothers.

Now, he doesn't explicitly say, as some are reporting, that he is OK with gay men being priests. But, since the "lobby" is supposed to consist primarily of clergy, it is at least a reasonable reading of what he means--he is distinguishing between gay priests who are part of the "lobby" and other gay priests. So, it could be nothing, or it could represent a return to the status quo prior to Benedict.

The second comment relates to divorced and remarried Catholics. Before gay rights, abortion, and even contraception were front-and-center, the fact that the Catholic Church will not recognize a second marriage as valid (save for going through the complex annulment process) has been a third-rail of Catholic social teaching.  The fact that the Pope is apparently setting the groundwork for some sort of policy change is very unexpected.  In purely practically terms, this is bigger than the gay comments--there are far more divorced Catholics than there are gay men who are looking at the priesthood, or gay men in general. I think this is a real bombshell.

The third story does not come from Pope Francis's comments, but from a bit of inside baseball in the Vatican--a small, new religious order called the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate got the smack-down. What was notable about the FFI is that they are the only general-purpose religious order to require its members to say only the old Latin Mass as opposed to the post-Vatican II vernacular Mass. Or more accurately, they used to be the only order to do so--the Vatican's decree says now they must say the modern Mass, and can only say the Latin Mass with permission.

This is significant, because it is hard to interpret this as anything but a roll-back of Pope Benedict's efforts to bring back the Latin Mass. The hardcore Latin crowd was nervous about Francis from Day One and freaked out when he declined much of the regalia of the Pope immediately after his election. This move has only increased their freak-out level (if you would like a sense of their state of mind, you can look here).

So, nothing of actual substance, but signs of substantive things to come. Very interesting.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out of the church a
Read more

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Image
1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbation is going to result in those folks
Read more