Francis Disappoints, Again

LGBT Catholics say the upcoming World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, the world’s largest Catholic gathering of families and an event that Pope Francis will attend, is missing an opportunity by offering just one session on LGBT concerns.

I’d say so, given that at that single session:

Ron Belgau, editor of a website called Spiritual Friendship, is to speak, along with his mother, at a session titled “Always Consider the Person: Homosexuality in the Family.” He is gay and celibate.

The mindset of the Roman church is shown by Archibishop of Philadelphia Charles Joseph Chaput, who remarked that “We don’t want to provide a platform at the meeting for people to lobby for positions contrary to the life of our Church.”

The pope’s embrace of redistributive/regulatory economics and climate-change alarmism (or, more accurately, apocalypticalism) has won him applause from certain leftish constituencies. But its all of a piece with the church’s authoritarian and reactionary mindset.

Added: Yes, apocalypticalism. In 2009, ABC News reported, with deep seriousness, predictions that 2015 would see climate-catastrophe-based prices of $12.00 for a gallon of milk and $9.00 for a gallon for gasoline, if gas was available at all. Increase government control over the economy, now!

More. Via the Washington Post, LGBT groups don’t feel the love in Philadelphia:

Catholicism teaches that sexual relationships between unmarried people are immoral, and adds that sex between two people of the same gender is a “grave depravity” because it doesn’t biologically produce children. “Under no circumstances can they be approved,” church teaching says of gay relationships. However gay people are to be treated respectfully and not subject to “unjust discrimination.” Francis has emphasized dialogue and love, though his positions on sexuality and gender appear to remain fully orthodox.

12 Comments for “Francis Disappoints, Again”

  1. posted by Jorge on

    LGBT Catholics say the upcoming World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, the world’s largest Catholic gathering of families and an event that Pope Francis will attend, is missing an opportunity by offering just one session on LGBT concerns.

    This sounds like your typical idiotic glass 10% empty activism.

    The mindset of the Roman church is shown by Archibishop of Philadelphia Charles Joseph Chaput, who remarked that “We don’t want to provide a platform at the meeting for people to lobby for positions contrary to the life of our Church.”

    Well, duh! Oh, and duh for Mr. Miller’s usual anti-Catholic Church vibe. Because those glass 10% empty activists are going to be using whatever meeting they have as a platform–not a bad thing, by the way. Run with what they give and spike the football. Talk about the meeting and its inadequacies. That’s all fine. But let’s not pretend they have the moral high ground doing it. They’re just being mercenary. There comes a point when you have to say to the Black Lives Matter movement, all lives matter. The same applies here.

  2. posted by Houndentenor on

    Perhaps it is my general distrust of authority, or my upbringing in a denomination with little hierarchical structure, or just my early indoctrination in the virtues of representative democracy over monarchies and dictatorships, but I can’t help but find the whole spectacle of American Catholics waiting for the pope, the cardinals and the bishops to catch up with the vast majority of Catholics on a wide range of issues both bizarre and rather sad. They have every right to continue to hope for reform and be disappointed at ever turn, but but that wait is in vain. I can’t decide if it’s Waiting for Godot or Waiting for Guffman, but it is an exercise in futility.

    • posted by Jorge on

      Hmm. Did you know that some African Americans in the South remained in Catholicism even though it practiced segregation in its church? Should they be disappointed the church didn’t catch up with other Catholics? Are their efforts useless?

      And speaking of the “virtues” of representative democracy over monarchies and dictatorships, this would be an apt time to ridicule the sheer insanity of a political regime which within five year increments turns respectable law abiding pillars of the community into bigots to be erased from society. Who was that Greek philosopher who was executed by mob democracy?

      • posted by Houndentenor on

        For me this is more a cultural problem than a religious one. I don’t understand Catholics’ expected obedience to a medieval monarchy. I probably never will. It’s an archaic remnant from the Middle Ages. They have the right to follow whatever religion they choose, I’m just baffled that people expect something to change that is designed not to.

        As for the rest, what “law abiding pillars of the community” are you talking about. I never looked at anti-gay bigots as such, nor did I as a child look at segregationists that way, although I suppose the majority of people in my community did. The fact that a wrong has been exposed doesn’t mean those who were wrong get a pass because their opinion was once the majority. That’s why we have a constitution: to avoid tyranny by a majority of bigoted people. It’s taking awhile, but we will arrive at equal rights for all citizens eventually.

        • posted by Jorge on

          That’s why we have a constitution: to avoid tyranny by a majority of bigoted people.

          No, that’s why we have a Bill of Rights. The Constitution is the majoritarian part. The Bill of Rights amending the constitution is the one that’s anti-tyranny. And then you have the 14th Amendment, which asserts federal control even more strongly than the Constitution does, in the name of the Bill of Rights.

      • posted by Tom Scharbach on

        And speaking of the “virtues” of representative democracy over monarchies and dictatorships, this would be an apt time to ridicule the sheer insanity of a political regime which within five year increments turns respectable law abiding pillars of the community into bigots to be erased from society.

        I would gently suggest that the process of exposing the bigotry (irrational intolerance towards gays and lesbians general based on real or imagined group characteristics, with accompanying fear-mongering) underlying sodomy laws, police harrassment, housing/education/job discrimination, marriage equality and the like has been ongoing for many, many years (dating back at least into the 1950’s in this country) and that the prime mover of exposing the bigotry has been done by the supposedly “social” and “religious” conservatives who espoused discrimination against gays and lesbians over the years.

        The “respectable law abding pillars of the community” (e.g. Anita Bryant, John Briggs, Bryan Fischer, Brian Brown, Paul Cameron, Brian Camenker, James Dobson, Maggie Gallagher, Robert George, Jerry Falwell, Peter LaBarbera, Scott Lively, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, George Rekers, Louis Sheldon, Matt Staver, Donald Wildmon, and Joseph Zanga, to name a few outside the realm of politics) fanned the flames of fear and loathing about homosexuals and homosexuality, and, because the arguments that they made were almost entirely composed of irrational fear-mongering, exventually exposed themselves.

        Granted, the process of exposing the underlying bigotry has moved forward with warp-like speed in the last few years, as the courts started testing the “objective” (that is, non-religious) arguments made for discrimination. In each court test, the “objective” arguments were shown to be irrational or non-existent, and the house of cards collapsed.

        But no “political regime” was the moving force. It has been a case of “the louder they spoke, the more they made our case”.

        • posted by Houndentenor on

          Politicians haven’t been a “driving force” on gay issues for a long time (if ever). I’d describe them as “dead weight” we have to drag along behind us.

  3. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    The Catholic Church has long taught an odd coupling of social justice and social conservatism. Lay Catholics are more or less evenly split between Democrat-leaning and Republican-leaning constituencies, the former embracing the social justice teachings while discounting the social conservative teachings, the latter discounting the social justice teachings while embracing the social conservative teachings.

    Francis is saying nothing new about capitalism. John Paul II made the case in even stronger terms in a 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, and John Paul II, in turn was saying nothing new about the danger of unconstrained capitalism.

    I think that the current uproar stems from the fact that the American Catholic bishops have been focusing on the Church’s social conservative teachings for the last couple of decades, and Francis’ remarks kicked them out of their comfortable somnambulance on Catholic teaching.

  4. posted by Wilberforce on

    Love the creative language.
    The solid consensus of the scientific community is ‘climate change alarmism,’ and the basic message of the prophets and the gospels is ‘re-distributive/ regulatory economics.’
    It makes me sad; republicans are so obsessively selfish that they can’t understand even the basics of educated culture.

    • posted by Houndentenor on

      Yes, and never mind that the Bible explicitly and repeatedly prohibits charging interest on loans.

  5. posted by Jorge on

    …I think that the current uproar stems from the fact that the American Catholic bishops have been focusing on the Church’s social conservative teachings for the last couple of decades, and Francis’ remarks kicked them out of their comfortable somnambulance on Catholic teaching.

    Ehhh, I always thought the Americans were moderate on social issues.

    The Catholic Church has long taught an odd coupling of social justice and social conservatism.

    It can be very difficult to understand some of their writings coherently.

    To me the logic is quite masterful and profound, in a mad sort of way.

  6. posted by Tom Jefferson 3rd on

    The Vatican has lots of internal politics and factions that don’t get much coverage.

    For the Pope, to be successful at anything, has to take into account these internal affairs. So, it is difficult to know how much change to policy, he really favors.

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