Vatican softens tone toward gays and lesbians
Delia Gallagher ("CNN," June 26, 2014)
ROME (CNN) - The Vatican said Thursday that gays and lesbians must be
treated with respect, their children may be baptized in the church, and
admitted that Catholic priests are sometimes unsure about how to deal with
same-sex couples.
There is a “certain unease at the challenge of accepting these people with
a merciful spirit and, at the same time, holding to the moral teaching of
the Church,” the Vatican said in a document, called an Instrumentum Laboris.
The 75-page document is a compilation of the results of a survey sent to
114 bishops’ conferences around the world. Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri,
General Secretary of the Synod, said that 85% of the conferences responded to
the survey.
The document will be used as a guideline for discussions at the synod, a
meeting of top Catholic bishops convened by Pope Francis, to be held in Rome
in October.
The official name of the synod is "The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in
the Context of Evangelization."
Another synod to be held in October 2015, will provide further reflection
on the questions before presenting a final document to the Pope.
Well before the Vatican released Thursday's document, a national bishops'
conference in Germany and Switzerland said their surveys exposed a wide gap
between church teaching and lay Catholics' personal views.
"Most of the baptized have an image of the church that, on the one hand, is
family friendly in its attitude, whilst at the same time considering her
sexual morality to be unrealistic," the German bishops said, according to
National Catholic Reporter.
Bishops in the United States declined to make their survey results public.
While the Vatican document release Thursday does not change church teaching
on homosexuality, it aligns with Pope Francis' softer tone toward gays and
lesbians, made famous last July with his question, "Who am I to judge?"
[ How about: Who am I to take the Bible seriously? as the motto of this
social worker pope. This is what we have, first a social worker president and
now a social worker pope. But what does anyone expect these days? The
reaction in Europe to the rise of Cultural Marxism, which is what this amounts
to, has been the rise of a new hard Right in politics; this may happen in
America. BR comment ]
The document firmly rejects gay marriage, for instance, but also said
Catholics leaders, “are trying to find a balance between the Church’s teaching
on the family and a respectful, non-judgmental attitude towards people
living in such unions.”
[The Apostle Paul, who seems to have become irrelevant to the Vatican,
preached the exact opposite message and we know from Church / Christian
history that the first generations of believers excluded homosexuals completely
and were more than willing to inform on such false Christians so that the
Romans, as Romans 1 says, would put them to death, which, said Paul
explicitly, is what they deserve. BR comment]
“A distinction must be made,” the Instrumentum Laboris says, “between
those who have made a personal, and often painful, choice and live that choice
discreetly so as not to give scandal to others, and those whose behavior
promotes and actively – often aggressively – calls attention to it.”
One suggestion recommends, “not using phrases such as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ or
‘homosexual’ to define a person’s identity,” in order to “take every
aspect of the person into consideration.”
Another suggestion is a “theological study in dialogue with the human
sciences to develop a multi-faceted look at the phenomenon of homosexuality.”
The document also emphasizes that when gay couples request baptism for
their children, “the child must be received with the same care, tenderness and
concern which is given to other children.”
Other topics to be addressed at the Synod include contraception, and in
vitro fertilization, cohabitation, separated, divorced and remarried persons,
and teen mothers.
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