“their answer would have been an unambiguous: “No! I absolutely do not approve of homosexuality; it is a mortal sin”
That would have been an incomplete answer then, and it is an incomplete answer now. The Pope gave a better, more adequate answer.”
It seemed to me that the Holy Father gave the other half of the answer, but look as I might, I cannot find the unambiguous statement above.
It is the absence thereof that is at issue.
I’m sorry, but in my haste to respond to the earlier post I, obviously, was not as clear as I should have been. The “unambiguous” quote is something I made up as an example of what a pre-Modernist pope (Pius XII and earlier) would have said if asked the same question that Pope Francis posed for himself.
But in spite of what Annalex might say, this pope’s response was woefully inadequate as far as teaching the truth of the Catholic Church. The media and the homosexuals love his response because he did not condemn the practice of homosexuality––he merely did not endorse it. That is thew complaint of traditional Catholics.
Good. He gave the precise answer: that concupiscence, including homosexual tendency is not yet sin; it becomes actual sin when the tendency becomes practice. Note, too, that it was a quick off-the-cuff remark to a reporter, not an encyclical.