The Pope pulls a rabbit out of his biretta (Epiphanies guidelines apply)
Baptist Trainfan
Shipmate
Not really a point for discussion - but this has amazed me!
https://tinyurl.com/82ma5faw
https://tinyurl.com/82ma5faw
Comments
Well, yes - significant, perhaps, but not maybe seismic! Still, a step in the right direction, I think...
RCC Shipmates may well have other opinions....not to mention those in the more conservative parts of the rapidly-diminishing C of E.
Just so. I bet the reactionaries/traditionalists will soon be bloviating, if they haven't already done so,
However it isn't a wide open door for same sex/ remarried divorcees blessings. For starters they can't take place during a liturgy and it must be clear that this is not to be confused with a marriage.
If I have the link correct, you can read the actual document from the Dicastery. The approach is a "broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings" and recognizing them as distinct from a sacrament or liturgical rite.
Thanks,
Doublethink, Admin
It doesn't go nearly far enough for LGBTQI+ Catholics or most queer activists and is hedged with conditions, not affirming enough. That said, it does seem to me to be significant for a couple of reasons (my fellow Catholics are free to disagree with me here).
This isn't an informal speech from the Pope, as were his previous comments off-the-record to reporters aboard a plane flight. This amounts to a rebuke and official response to the dubia or questions posed by conservative Cardinals before the Synod opened. Fiducia supplicans is an eight-page document issued December 18th by the Pope together with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith indicating a doctrinal shift in the exercise of sacramentals that cannot be reversed or over-ruled without signalling a rupture in papal statements and the hermeneutic of continuity. Popes do not usually contradict their predecessors. In 2021 this same powerful Dicastery issued a statement without official papal approval refusing permission for the blessing of same-sex unions, saying that 'God cannot bless sin.' In July this year, Francis replaced the head of the Dicastery office with his fellow Argentinian Cardinal Fernandez.
This shift wasn't just a private decision on the part of a quixotic pope. Francis had to take cognisance of what has been happening in more liberal, affluent and influential circles of the Catholic church in Europe. This timeline is one I have been watching closely: in March 2023, German bishops approved the liturgy for the blessing of same-sex unions; in September Belgian bishops published guidelines for such blessing and in the same month bishops in Cologne held a public blessing for same-sex unions, as queer couples gathered before Cologne cathedral. With or without papal approval, the shift was happening.
I do wonder about the generational aspect of this. It is no secret that the younger generations in the Church are more conservative than the older ones. The greater retention and conversion rates of more conservative churches relative to more progressive ones have been studied by sociologists of religion since at least the 1970s, and the internal dynamics of the Catholic Church are no exception. Here is the data for the Catholic Church in the US, for instance:
https://imgur.com/Wr6G1AP
(Source)
While no figures are available, the same very much seems to be true of France (which is the situation I am most familiar with, being half-French and having lived most of my life there): the people who are actually having children, raising them as Catholics and providing new clergy are considerably more conservative on average than the Church hierarchy, whose average age there is 63. (For context, Pope Francis has just turned 87 and his head of doctrine is 61.) Symptomatically, the large demonstrations against same-sex marriage in France ten years ago were organized first and foremost by lay Catholics, not by the clergy.
Given this generational split, the next few decades are going to be interesting, especially if Francis's successor is as progressive as he is.
Given that Pope Francis is in poor health, he may choose to retire as Benedict XVI did, and I'm not sure his successor will be progressive. The reception of Francis' schemes and liberal sympathies haven't been as popular among the clergy as they have been among laypeople or the media. The character of Francis has been too erratic, impulsive and whimsical for many -- his encyclicals make for a tricky read, an odd mix of CELAM and vague idealism.
Indeed; one gets the impression that Francis very much bears the mark of that era, having been ordained in 1969, and all the more so because he went into the Latin American Jesuits, who are a tendency all of their own.
It's true that, whatever the parties at play, there probably isn't much appetite among the cardinals for someone quite of the same impredictable bent, of which the (in)famous off-the-cuff remarks have been another manifestation. I suppose it remains to be seen whether, as has been rumoured, Francis will indeed reform the papal election rules, which he very probably wouldn't do in such a way as to favour a conservative successor.
What has infuriated many Catholic conservatives is not so much the approval of the same-sex blessing in itself but the creatively casuistical way in which Francis demonstrated how the Vatican could, without breaking any of its own rules, go about breaking those rules.
Indeed; the Herald had this article the other day about the historical mutability of election rules, with various examples of past elections that took place under quite different rules or conditions from modern ones.
I do love the use of the word "casuistical" in reference to a Jesuit! One is reminded of the funnily absurd mental gymnastics used by early modern Jesuit moral theologians to justify usury, duelling, theft, and various other things that were condemned by the Church as mortal or excommunicable sins, as quoted by Pascal in his Provincial Letters; and which is, of course, the sort of thing that gave rise to the adjective "Jesuitical". It also reminds me, if I may be permitted this light-hearted aside, of one of my favourite Catholic jokes.
Two Jesuit novices are praying in the seminary chapel and thinking that they'd quite like a cigarette while praying. One says to the other: "I'll go ask the superior." He gets up, then comes back five minutes later, kneels back down, and says: "Nope, we're not allowed." To this the other novice says: "Let me speak to him." He leaves, comes back five minutes later, kneels down, takes out a cigarette and lights it. The first novice asks: "Wait a minute; how come you're allowed to smoke and I'm not?" To which the second replies: "You asked if you could smoke while you prayed. I asked if I could pray while I smoked."
The response from the likes of Burke will be interesting. And of bishops conferences in places that have culturally conditioned "views" about homosexuality that are backed up with legal sanctions.
How much are these personal clerical encounters, so much relied on by Francis in his message, a real feature of Roman Catholic life? They haven't really been much of a feature of my life, really since COVID, though they were previously. I'm a liberal moderately catholic member of the Church of England, btw.
@Nick Tamen I've been puzzling over this since yesterday because I missed that distinction on a first read. Going back to a Vatican news commentary on the Dicastery document, it says: "Although the couple is blessed but not the union, the Declaration notes that what is blessed is the legitimate relationship between the two people." So the same-sex couple are not being blessed as individuals because their relationship is acknowledged as worthy of blessing. How this applies to divorced people in irregular unions, I am not sure.
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/how-big-deal-new-vatican-document-same-sex-blessings?utm_source=NCR+List&utm_campaign=badd940f6c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_12_20_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6981ecb02e-badd940f6c-[LIST_EMAIL_ID]
Pope Francis,at least to me, to understand that for many members of the Church the ideals are there to remain as ideals but that the everyday human condition does not always allow us to achieve these ideals in this life.
In the past week we have had two big funerals in our parish church both of which had over 300 people in the building. One of them was for a parishioner who was a leading figure in Scottish artistic life,the other was for a parishioner who was a lead nurse in an important hospital for people with mental difficulties. Both of them had contributed immensely to parish life AND to the life of the wider community over decades. People from within and from without the parish community came together to celebrate their lives and in many cases to pray for their eternal wellbeing . To me this is the Church at its best.
Very handy if you are going to be pulling rabbits out of it, you don't want them jumping up and down on the papal noggin.
I have to say that I am neither RCC nor LGBT+, but I suspect I have more friends who are LGBT+ than are RCC (I certainly have more that I *know* are LGBT+), and I think that this could usher in some very interesting changes. Hopefully any papal successor will not backtrack.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/pope-francis-surrogacy-1.7077151
With you on this.
Don't confuse the church with the hierarchy.
The bishops may preach what you say, but the rest of the church seems to have completely disregarded them.
//brief tangent
Am I the last Catholic around to realise that Ash Wednesday falls on St Valentine's Day this year? On February 14 everyone will be talking about romantic dinners of steak and chocolate fondant while Catholics are wandering around daubed in ash and saying they have given up chocs for Lent.
end tangent//
What you're talking about is what I think of as the Humanae Vitae fall-out of 1968 when most of the educated and affluent Catholic West chose to ignore the papal encyclical forbidding contraception. And couples since have opted to disregard their local bishops or church teachings on contraception or therapeutic abortions.
Missionary Catholicism is another story: the silencing of women, forced marriages and deaths of women in childbirth. The RCC has not spoken up about domestic violence or weaponised rape or the abduction of adolescent girls during war. Many rural clinics in southern Africa are staffed by Catholic healthcare workers who refuse to perform abortions even for urgent medical reasons and there is nowhere else for women to go. Safe and effective contraception is expensive or simply unobtainable in many areas.
It is complicated, we all know that. Until very recently, most communities in the Indian subcontinent or across Africa had to cope with high rates of infant mortality, so the emphasis was on survival and families with large numbers of children were the norm. Urbanised society puts such families at increased risk of poverty and instability. The influence of rightwing religious movements from the West has stigmatised not just women choosing not to have children but those in alternative relationships or who assume gender non-conforming identities. While the Roman Catholic church membership on the ground is diverse and often at odds with the hierarchy, there remains a power structure that reinforces conservative sexist attitudes.
Or can afford it.
Yes. A massive issue and one ignored by westerners who berate people in developing countries for having too many children.