Conservative cardinals had challenged the pope to confirm teachings on LGBTQ+ issues
Pope Francis has suggested there could be ways to bless same-sex unions, responding to five conservative cardinals who challenged him to affirm church teaching on homosexuality ahead of a big meeting where LGBTQ+ Catholics are on the agenda.
The Vatican on Monday published a letter Francis wrote to the cardinals on 11 July after receiving a list of five questions, or dubia, from them a day earlier. In it, Francis suggests that such blessings could be studied if they did not confuse the blessing with sacramental marriage.
New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBTQ+ Catholics, said the letter “significantly advances” efforts to make LGBTQ+ Catholics welcomed in the church and represented “one big straw towards breaking the camel’s back” in their marginalisation.
The Vatican holds that marriage is an indissoluble union between man and woman. As a result, it has long opposed gay marriage. But Francis has voiced support for civil laws extending legal benefits to same-sex spouses, and Catholic priests in parts of Europe have been blessing same-sex unions without Vatican censure.
Francis’ response to the cardinals, however, marks a reversal from the Vatican’s current official position. In an explanatory note in 2021, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that the church could not bless gay unions because “God cannot bless sin”.
It’s more the opposite, that religion was dragging society into the past.
Around 30 years after Jesus and around 5-10 before the first gospel is written, Nero, emperor of Rome, married two men. First as the wife and then as the husband.
Suddenly the gospel that’s written right after it is adamant that the guy who died thirty years before this happened was all like “marriage is between a man and a woman.”
So gay marriage was a thing, but then the rise and spread of Christianity with a conservative social take made it so that it wasn’t for a very long time.
50 years before Jesus is born, Leucretius described natural selection and mendelian trait inheritance in surprisingly explicit detail.
The surviving copy of that book from antiquity ended up being eaten by worms in a church library until it was liberated by the secretary of the Pope bribing a monk to bring it to his Renaissance book club.
So no, it’s not so much modernity dragging the church forward, it’s that finally the church has temporarily lost the ability to hold modernity back.
But looking at book bans or education ‘reforms’ in the US south, there’s certainly efforts underway to dig those claws back in.