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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The Catholic Church has always maintained:

  • same-sex marriage is an impossibility
  • same-sex sexual/erotic relationships are disordered, immoral and sinful.
  • Priests should not bless sin
  • Priests have wide discretion to give blessings to anyone and everyone, for mundane things and important things, even and especially to sinners. Eg you have the priest bless your pet or your hunting rifle or many other things. It would be possible to ask for a blessing in a business partnership or a promise of livelong brotherly love and friendship.
  • Priests should not give blessings to same-sex unions, or give any blessings to same sex couples in a way that would be scandalous (ie make it seem it is giving approval to sinful behavior) or that would create confusion with a sacramental marriage or confusion about church doctrine.

The recently released document reiterates all those points. The ABC headline is simply false

However, the thing that the liberals in the church are excited about is the changing emphasis in terms of pastoral care:

Paragraph 12. One must also avoid the risk of reducing the meaning of blessings to this point of view alone, for it would lead us to expect the same moral conditions for a simple blessing that are called for in the reception of the sacraments. Such a risk requires that we broaden this perspective further. Indeed, there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites, which, under the claim of control, could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.

Paragraph 13. Precisely in this regard, Pope Francis urged us not to “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and to avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.”[11] Let us then respond to the Holy Father’s proposal by developing a broader understanding of blessings.

So previously maybe two gay men walk into the church and ask the priest, "Can you bless our dedication of life-long love to each other?" The priest is wary and says, "Wait ... love 'amore' or love 'caritas'?" So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.

After this document, a liberal priest now has a winking approval from a Vatican that he is allowed to play ignorant and not "subject the couple to moral prerequisites" and avoid "being a judge who rejects." So instead of asking about the nature of their relationship or telling them to go and sin no more, he may give a blessing like, "may all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit."

So it is effectively "don't ask, don't tell" with respect to blessings? I hope it works out better than it did for the military.

So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.

Yeah, I think the idea here is that "well if the two of them are in a committed relationship and not whoring around promiscuously, that's better than nothing, so don't break the bruised reed", something like Benedict's comments on using condoms, but it's not the ideal. And of course the liberals are going to run full-tilt with this on "yes bless your marriage yes sure it's fine to fuck around".

"well if the two of them are in a committed relationship and not whoring around promiscuously, that's better than nothing, so don't break the bruised reed"

I can kinda see this for heterosexual relationships since they can always be made an honest woman/man eventually.

Someone who decided to get gay married is actively making a commitment to an institution that has never been accepted by the church. It's not just sin but defiance, defiance in service of a set of cultural memes (for one: that a person's "gay" identity trumps their religious identity, or the prescriptions it implies) that are hostile to a bunch of traditional religious views.

"Not ideal" seems like an understatement.

I can kinda see this for heterosexual relationships since they can always be made an honest woman/man eventually.

Not necessarily; the Catholic Church does not recognize marriages where either party has been divorced.

“Catholic Church”, “marriages”, and “divorced”, should be in scare quotes for that sentence to be even remotely accurate to ground-level reality.

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