Uh-huh.
http://time.com/3975630/pope-francis-lgbt-issues/
1. Pope Francis said that God doesn’t condemn LGBT individuals — Sept. 30, 2013
2. Pope Francis suggested the church could be open to (homosexual) civil unions — March 5, 2014
3. The Francis effect goes global — Summer of 2014
The summer of 2014 was a remarkable period during which a number of high-ranking Catholic prelates signaled that Pope Francis’s more open posture had permeated throughout the Catholic world. In May, a top-ranking Italian bishop said that the church should listen to same-sex marriage arguments. A few weeks later, Brazilian Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, said he “didn’t know” whether Jesus would oppose gay marriage. In early September, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan approved the St. Patrick Day Parade Committee’s decision to allow a gay group to march in the 2015 parade under their own banner. (Twenty-one years earlier, one of Dolan’s predecessors, Cardinal John O’Connor, said that to allow a gay group to march would be a slander to the Apostles’ Creed.)
4. The Synod on the Family’s interim report affirmed the “gifts and qualities” of LGBT individuals — October 2014
5. The pope began a series of meetings and dialogues with LGBT individuals and activists — 2015
Throughout the first months of 2015, Pope Francis had several encounters with LGBT individuals and groups, including a transgender man from Spain who was excluded from his parish community, and gay and transgender prisoners in Naples. The Vatican also gave the VIP treatment to a pro-LGBT American Catholic group visiting Rome and the pope met with a gay Paraguayan activist during his recent trip to South America.
Collectively these events signal a church that is more open to welcoming the LGBT community and the diverse realities of the modern family than it was two years ago. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in support of same-sex marriage last month, Blase Cupich, Pope Francis’s handpicked archbishop of Chicago, said the church’s respect for LGBT individuals “must be real, not rhetorical, and ever reflective of the Church’s commitment to accompanying all people.” Such language would have been rare two years ago. Today it’s expected. Thank God.
1) There’s a certain ambiguity of language here. If by LGBT individuals, you mean persons who experience a predominantly same-sex attraction, you are talking about tendency, temperament, temptation, not necessarily consent to sin. Temptation does not equal sin.
2) The word “homosexual” was added here. A decision of two people to form a kind of stable household unit could be a caregiver daughter and her disabled mother, a mentally handicapped young adult and his older brother, two elderly sisters sharing the old family home, or other kinds of friendship or kinship bonds. I don’t think the Pope ever said a stable partnership specifically or manifestly predicated on sodomy was legitimate. If he did by all means correct me. I respect evidence.
3) Attributing others’ words and actions to Francis’ influence can be an insightful guess, but does not constitute proof in itself, that is, a just judgment.
4) LGBT peoples’ gifts and qualities: how could we deny that anybody has gifts and qualities? Everybody has some gift. It is not predicated on sodomy (or pride, avarice, lust, or insobriety ot any other sin.) Our sins tend strongly to ruin our gifts.
5) Dialogue with sinners is not the same as approval of sin, unless the Gospels have it all wrong about Jesus.
I resent the #%$# out if it when I feel I’m being pushed into defending Pope Francis’ dangerous ambiguities and even more dangerous personnel decisions and dubious forays of papal diplomacy and governance. There’s plenty there to criticize, and I do criticize it.
However it is false to say that Pope Francis “does nothing but” defend sexual sin. He simply does not, and to assert this you have to ignore a great deal of what he actually does say.
That’s part of a larger tendency to insist that he must be wrong about everything.
Examining the whole can o’ worms, it seems to me that his dreadful undermining of doctrine comes not from propositional heresy, but from ceaseless propagation of ambiguity and confusion.
And God is not the Author of confusion.
I do sometimes -— sincerely -— wonder whether Pope Francis may have a brain lesion.