"Look not on our sins:" Pope Francis speaks on homosexuality

If you ask me, much too much is currently being made of the answer Pope Francis gave in responding to a question asked by Brazilian journalist Ilze Scamparini, who is a Vatican correspondent for Italy’s Globo network, during his in-flight news conference on his return trip to Rome from Rio de Janeiro last Sunday.

The transcript of his in-flight press conference is available only in Italian (some of it is in Spanish) on the Holy See’s website. Here is my imperfect translation of Scamparini’s question:

With permission, I would like to ask a question that is a little delicate, one that has been ‘turned over a bit’ all over the world, that concerning Mgr. Ricci, news about his intimate life. I want to know, Your Holiness, what will you do about this matter? How does Your Holiness intend to deal with this issue and the whole issue of the gay lobby?

While I initially originally translated Pope Francis’ response myself, I wound up using Matthew Sherry’s translation from Sandro Magister’s 31 July article on Chiesa “From Rio de Janeiro to Rome, from Poetry to Prose” with a few bits of my translation thrown in, which are in brackets:

"In the case of monsignor Ricca I have done what canon law says to do: an initial investigation. There has been found nothing of that of which he has been accused. We have not found anything. [This is the answer. But I would add one more thing on this:] Many times in the Church the sins of youth are sought out and then publicized. We are not talking about offenses, about crimes, like the abuse of minors which is a completely different thing, but about sins. But if a layperson or a priest or a sister has committed a sin and has converted and [repents], the Lord forgives, he forgets. [This is important for our lives. When we go to confession and sincerely say, “I have sinned in this,” the Lord forgets and so we do not have the right not to forget because then we run the risk that the Lord does not forget. That's a danger. This is important for our theology.] So many times I think of Saint Peter who committed the gravest sin, he denied Christ. And yet they made him pope. But I repeat, about Monsignor Ricca we have not found anything. [This is the first issue.] So much is written about the gay lobby. So far I have not found anyone at the Vatican who has written “gay” on his identity card. A distinction must be made between being gay, having this tendency, and being in a lobby. The lobbies, all lobbies, are not good. If a person is gay and is seeking the Lord with good will, who am I to judge him? The [C]atechism of the Catholic Church teaches that gay persons must not be discriminated against, but must be welcomed. The problem is not having this tendency, the problem is being in a lobby, and this applies here just as it does to business lobbies, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies. [This is the most serious problem for me. And thank you so much for asking this question. Thank you very much]

Words taken out of context are usually employed to create a pretext. This is what I see happening with these words of the Holy Father. He makes clear that one must distinguish between the “tendency” of being attracted to members of one’s own sex, which is not a sin in likely the vast majority of cases precisely because it is not chosen, and acting on that tendency. Acting on this tendency is a choice (unless one is being coerced- in which case it is not a sin). This is no scandal because, according to Church teaching, all choices that violate the virtue of chastity are objectively wrong, whether it takes the form of pre-marital or extra-marital sexual relations, solo sex, viewing pornography, or even a married couple using contraception. Now, whether such behavior can be imputed to a person as a sin depends on the formation of her/his conscience and how freely the behavior was chosen. This is boilerplate moral/pastoral theology, not anything new or provocative.

To pick one example, the case of contraception, the issue is that the consciences of married couples are not only unformed, but often malformed, with people often being taught and then reassured that they need not heed what Church teaches in this regard.

It is important that Pope Francis cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church. What does the Catechism say when it comes to homosexuality?

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection

To take more away from what Pope Francis said than what he said, especially when his intent is pretty clear, even including the fact that he used the word “gay” (he used this English word even when answering the question in Italian), is to do something he warned against in his speech to the CELAM Coordinating Committee- making the Gospel an ideology, that is, seeking to put the Gospel exclusively at the service of some political program, especially when it means twisting its meaning to achieve a desired end.

Let’s also not fail to note that the Holy Father is being authentically paternal (not paternalistic) when he encourages us to be merciful to each other as the Lord has been merciful to each of us, which means not going about inflicting what we imagine to be God’s punishment on each other, but helping and supporting one another in our pursuit sanctity. As we pray at Mass:

Lord Jesus Christ,
who said to your Apostles:
Peace I leave you, my peace I give you;
look not on our sins,
but on the faith of your Church,
and graciously grant her peace and unity
in accordance with your will
Who live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.

"God calls you to make definitive choices"

While World Youth Day is fresh in my memory, there is one other speech I was able to watch live on television that I found significant and full of meaning: Pope Francis' address to the 15,000 WYD volunteers who had been working on WYD in Rio for the past two year, an event that happened right after his address to the coordinating committee of CELAM. In light of my previous post note what he said to these dedicated young people: "The service you have given during these days brings to mind the mission of Saint John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus. Every one of you, each in his or her own way, was a means enabling thousands of young people to “prepare the way” to meet Jesus. And this is the most beautiful service we can give as missionary disciples."

Below is the heart of his message of gratitude to these young women and men:

God calls you to make definitive choices, and he has a plan for each of you: to discover that plan and to respond to your vocation is to move toward personal fulfillment. God calls each of us to be holy, to live his life, but he has a particular path for each one of us. Some are called to holiness through family life in the sacrament of Marriage. Today, there are those who say that marriage is out of fashion; in a culture of relativism and the ephemeral, many preach the importance of “enjoying” the moment. They say that it is not worth making a life-long commitment, making a definitive decision, “for ever”, because we do not know what tomorrow will bring. I ask you, instead, to be revolutionaries, to swim against the tide; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes that you are incapable of responsibility, that you are incapable of true love. I have confidence in you and I pray for you. Have the courage “to swim against the tide”. Have the courage to be happy.

The Lord calls some to be priests, to give themselves to him more fully, so as to love all people with the heart of the Good Shepherd. Some he calls to the service of others in the religious life: devoting themselves in monasteries to praying for the good of the world, and in various areas of the apostolate, giving of themselves for the sake of all, especially those most in need. I will never forget that day, 21 September – I was 17 years old – when, after stopping in the Church of San José de Floresto [to] go to confession, I first heard God calling me. Do not be afraid of what God asks of you! It is worth saying “yes” to God. In him we find joy!

Go be missionary disciples!

What is missing from post-WYD Catholic commentary? "Missionary discipleship"

World Youth Day in Rio Janiero ended with a bang, not a whimper. The bang was extended to Pope Francis' in-flight news conference during his trip back to Rome. In my view, we received more evidence that the Holy Father is very savvy in dealing with the media. Being well aware that something he might say would overshadow his entire Apostolic Journey to Brazil, he refused to take questions, that is, hold a news conference on the flight from Rome to Brazil. Then, with a successful trip under his belt, he opened up and held a presser on the flight home. As one would expect, the questions spanned a wide range of topics from homosexuality, to abortion, to divorced and re-married Catholics, all the hot-button issues. Predictably, all one has heard, even from the vast majority of the Catholic press and Catholic commentators are tortured, truncated, and dessicated editorial comments on his very non-controversial statements on these subjects, but, as you might expect, mostly on homosexuality.

In his response to this delicate question, Pope Francis invoked the Catechism and said, "The problem is not having this orientation. We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem." As one would expect, the Holy Father did not change Church teaching on-the-fly, as many keep hoping he will do, but maintained a strict distinction between orientation and behavior. Context always matters. Therefore, I think it is important to note that he was specifically speaking about priests who are homosexually-oriented, saying he does judge the fact they are sexually attracted to other males.

The fact that the ideologization (if I may be permitted the use of this neo-logism) is "the worst problem" when it comes to the issue of homosexuality is a nice segue into what I really I want to post about, which is what I believe to be the road map for Pope Francis' pontificate, something he set forth in his address to the coordinating committee of CELAM (acronym for Consejo Episcopal Latino Americano, or the Latin American Episcopal Conference), which was not part of the World Youth Day program. The road map is the so-called Aparecida document which was written at a gathering of CELAM in Brazil in 2007, which was the Fifth gathering of CELAM since its inception in 1965. This gathering was the occasion for Pope Benedict XVI's Apostolic Journey to Brazil. Then-Cardinal Bergoglio was the main author and architect of the Aparecida Document, which is available in its entirety en Inglés here.

What arises from the document is something called "missionary discipleship," which, unsurprisingly, is something that Pope Francis invoked several times in his homilies and addresses to the youth gathered for World Youth Day. In his speech to representatives of CELAM, the Holy Father spoke of three temptations "against missionary discipleship." The first of these is Making the Gospel message an ideology. About this he said,

This is a temptation which has been present in the Church from the beginning: the attempt to interpret the Gospel apart from the Gospel itself and apart from the Church. An example: Aparecida, at one particular moment, felt this temptation. It employed, and rightly so, the method of 'see, judge and act' (cf. No. 19). The temptation, though, was to opt for a way of 'seeing' which was completely 'antiseptic', detached and unengaged, which is impossible. The way we 'see' is always affected by the way we direct our gaze. There is no such thing as an 'antiseptic' hermeneutics. The question was, rather: How are we going to look at reality in order to see it? Aparecida replied: With the eyes of discipleship

Pope Francis following his speech to the Coordinating Committee of CELAM

Under the temptation of turning the Gospel into an ideology, he identifies four specific and distinct ways this is done:

a) Sociological reductionism. This is the most readily available means of making the message an ideology. At certain times it has proved extremely influential. It involves an interpretative claim based on a hermeneutics drawn from the social sciences. It extends to the most varied fields, from market liberalism to Marxist categorization.

b) Psychologizing. Here we have to do with an elitist hermeneutics which ultimately reduces the “encounter with Jesus Christ” and its development to a process of growing self-awareness. It is ordinarily to be found in spirituality courses, spiritual retreats, etc. It ends up being an immanent, self-centred approach. It has nothing to do with transcendence and consequently, with missionary spirit.

c) The Gnostic solution. Closely linked to the previous temptation, it is ordinarily found in elite groups offering a higher spirituality, generally disembodied, which ends up in a preoccupation with certain pastoral “quaestiones disputatae”. It was the first deviation in the early community and it reappears throughout the Church’s history in ever new and revised versions. Generally its adherents are known as “enlightened Catholics” (since they are in fact rooted in the culture of the Enlightenment).

d) The Pelagian solution. This basically appears as a form of restorationism. In dealing with the Church’s problems, a purely disciplinary solution is sought, through the restoration of outdated manners and forms which, even on the cultural level, are no longer meaningful. In Latin America it is usually to be found in small groups, in some new religious congregations, in tendencies to doctrinal or disciplinary “safety”. Basically it is static, although it is capable of inversion, in a process of regression. It seeks to “recover” the lost past

It seems many of us are content to play small ball, to major in the minors, to remain in the ideological fight, the culture war. I am not only referring to people on one side, but those on both sides. Politics is a very poor substitute for faith, which changes culture, not by fighting, but by transforming it from within, as leaven (Matt. 13:33). Playing politics with faith is playing with fire.

Pope Francis' message is the Gospel and the Gospel is nothing other than Jesus Christ. He is the sole criterion by which we judge everything.

Year C Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Gen. 18:20-32; Ps. 138:1-3.6-8; Col. 2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13

The Lord our God is kind and merciful. If you take away nothing from our readings today, remember that.

How merciful is the Lord our God? In his very first Sunday Angelus address, Pope Francis urged us to remember that “God never ever tires of forgiving us!” We may well tire of asking God to forgive us, but God never tires of so doing. We may also tire of forgiving those who have wronged us, but God, our merciful Father, because of the precious sacrifice of His only begotten Son, “never tires of forgiving” (17 March 2013 Angelus).

While this is good news, indeed, for many it is also a scandal. In our first reading today Abraham, our father in faith, eventually tires of imploring the LORD to be merciful towards the inhabitants of Sodom. He starts by asking God to spare the city His wrath if he can find fifty righteous people. God agrees. Feeling emboldened, Abraham lowers the number to forty-five. God agrees. He keeps bargaining and God keeps acceding: forty, thirty, twenty, and finally ten, before he inexplicably stops. Why do I say his stopping is inexplicable? Because up to that point the LORD had granted everything he asked. For those unfamiliar with the Middle Eastern way of doing business, even down to our day, it is a culture where prices are not fixed, like ours, but are negotiable. Both sides seek to obtain the best possible deal for themselves, each expecting the other to protect his bottom line.

Lot fleeing Sodom, by Benjamin West, ca. 1810

In Abraham’s negotiation with God, as witnessed by the LORD’s willingness to bargain as long as Abraham wanted to dicker, it was a win/win: the fewer people destroyed because of wickedness the better, both for Abraham and for God. What should strike us about this is that God has no appetite for destruction. His sending Jesus Christ into the world is the best proof of this that anyone can offer.

This brings us to the scandal of God’s Divine Mercy, which is divine because it is infinite, that is, unbounded, meaning that God’s mercy is higher, lower, wider, and broader than you or I can fathom. Attempting to impose limits on God’s mercy is to blasphemously attempt to reduce God to your own measure. We impose limits on God's mercy both when we exaggerate our sins, thinking them too great for God to forgive, and when we diminish the wrong we do, mistakenly believing that we don't need Divine Mercy. This is exactly what St. Paul is getting at in our second reading today. Writing about the powerful effects of baptism, in and through which we die, are buried, and rise in Christ, the apostle reminds, not just the saints in ancient Colossae, but you and I this very day that “even when you were dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, [Jesus Christ] brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:12-14).

I believe it is instructive to look at the verse that follows the last verse of today’s second reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, which not only brings this section of the letter to an end, but finishes the sentence left unfinished by the lectionary: “despoiling the principalities and the powers, he made a public spectacle of them, leading them away in triumph by it” (Col. 2:15). In addition to bringing us to life, the life that is truly life, by dying on the Cross for our sins, Christ not only defeated, but publicly humiliated and led away as captives the principalities and powers that seek to destroy us. All we have to do, my brothers and sisters, is lay claim to this victory again and again, never growing weary.

When we go to confession, we do not admit defeat. It is precisely how we lay claim to Christ’s victory, making His triumph our own. This is why, as Christians, we should grant discouragement no quarter in our lives. It is also why we should never grow weary of seeking the Lord’s mercy, of seeking His face, of laying claim to that life which is truly life: life in Christ. After all, isn’t that why we are here right now? If not, then being here now is useless!

In today’s Gospel Jesus urges us not merely to be persistent, but to be unrelenting in imploring the Father for good things in prayer: for His mercy, His grace, a greater portion of the Holy Spirit, for the fulfillment that is the desire of every human heart. Is this not the lesson we learn from father Abraham?

We can be unrelenting because God is trustworthy, as Jesus assures us, “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Luke 11:13) The theological virtue of hope means the ability to trust God. While hope, like faith and charity, is a theological virtue, meaning that it can only be initially acquired as a gift from God, it is something we can verify in reality, over and over again through the very circumstances of our lives.

Hope is the flower of faith. Faith comes, as Pope Francis recently reminded us in his first encyclical, Lumen fidei, which he co-authored with Benedict XVI, by means of a life-changing encounter with Christ. This encounter is decisive for everyone who has it (see Deus caritas est, par. 1). “Faith,” we read in Lumen fidei, “is no refuge for the fainthearted, but something which enhances our lives. It makes us aware of a magnificent calling, the vocation of love. It assures us that this love is trustworthy and worth embracing, for it is based on God’s faithfulness which is stronger than our every weakness” (par. 53).

Our blessed Lord told St. Paul, who implored Him three times to take away some unspecified "thorn in the flesh," "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." So, my brothers and sisters in Christ, with the apostle, let us heed what Christ urges us to do and never tire, but be content "with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ,” in the awareness that “ when [we are] weak, then [we are] strong" (2 Cor. 12:6-10).

Natural Family Planning Awareness Week 2013

Given all the emphasis put on resisting the unjust HHS mandate, such as the Fortnight for Freedom, one would think the USCCB's annual observance of Natural Family Awareness Week would merit more emphasis. But I doubt that many Catholics in the U.S. even know that this week, 21-27 July, is NFP Awareness Week. In addition to being in the midst of the struggle against the imposition of the unjust mandate, 25 July 2013 was the 45th anniversary of Pope Paul VI's promulgation of Humanae Vitae.

His Eminence, Cardinal Dolan of New York, grasped this when he said to the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto in an interview last year that Humanae Vitae "brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the church, that I think most of us—and I’m using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself—kind of subconsciously said, ‘Whoa. We’d better never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle." More important, he continued, the bishops "forfeited the chance to be a coherent moral voice when it comes to one of the more burning issues of the day."

But Cardinal Dolan also gives the reason why I think NFP Awareness Week remains a relatively obscure, under-the-radar observance: "We've grown hoarse saying this is not about contraception, this is about religious freedom." This is a statement with which I both agree and disagree. Allow me to explain why this is not merely an empty exercise in post-modern dialectics: It is not insofar as we hope to make common cause with other people of faith and even people of no faith, to stand firm on one of the bedrock principles of U.S. constitutional democracy. However, it is precisely about contraception, especially when access to contraception is viewed by many as a woman's "right." When framed in terms of competing rights, especially when an individual right is asserted, you must be able to engage at that fundamental level. The price of refusing to do so is to remain, both for Catholics and non-Catholics an incoherent moral voice. Such an approach also has the eefect of emptying religious freedom of any discernible content. It seems to me that that engaging on a more fundamental level became even more crucial when it was publicly disclosed that many Catholic institutions already voluntarily offered contraceptive coverage and also when it became public that other local churches and Catholic institutions, such as Archdiocese of New York, had already bowed to state, not federal, mandates in this regard.

Am I discouraged? No. There is great joy in living the truth. In other words, it is worth doing for it's own sake quite apart from whether anyone else does, or even quite apart from the growing number of people who think you are insane for so doing. I am especially encouraged by the number of wonderful women of my acquaintance who have been very active in promoting NFP Awareness Week through so many on-line apostolates, even just posting relevant links and updates on Facebook. Today I am also reminded of the beautiful witness of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity who, in response to the inhumane onslaught of coercive and deceptive birth control programs in India, began teaching Indian women NFP with great success.

If nothing else, I encourage anyone reading this post to visit the USCCB's NFP Awareness website, which is a wonderful, authoritative resource.

Over the seven years I have been a card-carrying member of the so-called Catholic blogosphere, I have posted extensively on this issue. So rather than provide a comprehensive list of links to past posts, I am providing links for posts on NFP over the past two years, plus adding two 2008 posts that marked the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae:

"Natural Family Planning Awareness Week"

"Amos was a prophet and so was Pope Paul"

HHS mandate: Why the kerfuffle?

"The joy of NFP"

"NFP: a faithful reality check"

"The reality of the human person"

"'Not everyone can receive this saying'"

"Humane Vitae turns 40: Updated and expanded 26 July 2008"

"Humane Vitae turns 40, part II"

"Now the thing that I call living is just being satisfied"

Last night, a beautiful and very hot summer evening, I was driving home from an appointment at the Cathedral listening to the radio. I heard Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," an amazing ballad. Hearing that song made me think of what an amazing and undervalued songwriter Lightfoot is. So, with no further adieu, our Friday traditio is Lightfoot's "Carefree Highway." It's a song that reminds of my Dad, his kind of music.

Searching through the fragments of my dream shattered sleep/I wonder if the years have closed her mind/I guess it must be wanderlust or trying to get free/From the good old faithful feeling we once knew

It's another song about freedom and how not to achieve it, as tempting as it at times. I'd have to say that at least once a week I have a fantasy about slipping away on the carefree highway, before once again realizing it is the "Highway to Hell." Of all the things Sartre was wrong about (he was wrong about almost everything), was his assertion that hell is other people. On the contrary, hell is being all about yourself.

Pope Francis urges young people to make "noise" UPDATED

The Holy See's official English translation is now available. So, this is updated as appropriate:

Some powerful words from the Holy Father speaking to pilgrims to WYD from his native Argentina in the Cathedral of San Sebastian in Rio de Janeiro. You can read his short address in its entirety here:

"Let me tell you what I hope will be the outcome of World Youth Day: I hope there will be noise. Here there will be noise, I’m quite sure. Here in Rio there will be plenty of noise, no doubt about that. But I want you to make yourselves heard in your dioceses, I want the noise to go out, I want the Church to go out onto the streets, I want us to resist everything worldly, everything static, everything comfortable, everything to do with clericalism, everything that might make us closed in on ourselves. The parishes, the schools, the institutions are made for going out ... if they don’t, they become an NGO, and the Church cannot be an NGO. May the bishops and priests forgive me if some of you create a bit of confusion afterwards. That’s my advice. Thanks for whatever you can do." Pope Francis

Note: this means bearing witness to Christ in a powerful way, like he used to do when he actually celebrated Mass and preached on the streets of Buenos Aires, when he rode the bus, etc. Take the Gospel to the streets! Bring Christ out to meet everyone. This why we are dismissed at the end of the Mass. Don't believe the silliness of faux dismissals, like "The Mass never ends, go in peace" (one that is [was?] popular at Teen Life masses). The Mass ends, Christ is in us, and He desires us to take Him to others. "Go in peace, proclaiming the Gospel of the Lord;" "Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life."

Servant of God, Madeleine Delbrel, pray for us! We the ordinary people of the streets.

He also had this to say, which puts some meat on the bones:

"Look, at this moment, I think our world civilization has gone beyond its limits, it has gone beyond its limits because it has made money into such a god that we are now faced with a philosophy and a practice which exclude the two ends of life that are most full of promise for peoples. They exclude the elderly, obviously. You could easily think there is a kind of hidden euthanasia, that is, we don’t take care of the elderly; but there is also a cultural euthanasia, because we don’t allow them to speak, we don’t allow them to act. And there is the exclusion of the young. The percentage of our young people without work, without employment, is very high and we have a generation with no experience of the dignity gained through work. This civilization, in other words, has led us to exclude the two peaks that make up our future. As for the young, they must emerge, they must assert themselves, the young must go out to fight for values, to fight for these values; and the elderly must open their mouths, the elderly must open their mouths and teach us! Pass on to us the wisdom of the peoples!"

Viva il Papa!

This kind of papal exhortation at WYD is not new. At the Vigil to begin WYD in 2005 in his native Germany, Pope Benedict spoke these words: "The saints, as we said, are the true reformers. Now I want to express this in an even more radical way: only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come, the definitive way to change the world....True revolution consists in simply turning to God who is the measure of what is right and who at the same time is everlasting love. And what could ever save us apart from love?"