May 28th, 2015
By now it’s pretty clear to everyone that same-sex marriage is on a collision course with religious freedom and that at a very near date institutions like the Catholic Church and its para-church operations are going to be placed in existential jeopardy.
On the one hand, this is bad.
On the other hand, there’s this:
ROME — A one-day study meeting — open only to a select group of individuals — took place at the Pontifical Gregorian University on Monday with the aim of urging “pastoral innovations” at the upcoming Synod of Bishops on the Family in October.
Around 50 participants, including bishops, theologians and media representatives, took part in the gathering, at the invitation of the presidents of the bishops’ conferences of Germany, Switzerland and France — Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Markus Büchel and Archbishop Georges Pontier.
One of the key topics discussed at the closed-door meeting was how the Church could better welcome those in stable same-sex unions, and reportedly “no one” opposed such unions being recognized as valid by the Church.
Participants also spoke of the need to “develop” the Church’s teaching on human sexuality and called not for a theology of the body, as famously taught by St. John Paul II, but the development of a “theology of love.”
One Swiss priest discussed the “importance of the human sex drive,” while another participant, talking about holy Communion for remarried divorcees, asked: “How can we deny it, as though it were a punishment for the people who have failed and found a new partner with whom to start a new life?” . . .
The article also quoted a participant as saying the synod would be a “failure” if it simply continued to affirm what the Church has always taught. . . .
A prominent critic of Humanae Vitae (The Regulation of Birth), as well as a strong supporter of homosexual clergy and those pushing for reform in the area of sexual ethics, Father Schockenhoff is known to be the leading adviser of the German bishops in the run-up to the synod.
Father Schockenhoff has also gone on record saying that moral theology must be “liberated from the natural law” and that conscience should be based on the “life experience of the faithful.”
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How does a Catholic publication mistranslate the Latin title of the encyclical? The “Humanae Vitae” part of the title is “Of Human Life” in English; “On the Regulation of Birth” is the tail end of the subtitle.
Nedward May 29, 2015 at 3:34 pm
Weeks ago the mandarins of Midtown had already discovered your next Catholic unity cause celebre:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/us/catholics-on-left-and-right-find-common-ground-opposing-death-penalty.html
And now even “Matt Dowd” tips it as the Next Great Civil Rights Struggle… Gay wedding cakes are so 1H ’15