Is Pope Francis Backpedaling on Gays?

I for one have always questioned Pope Francis' intentions towards gays and allowing us a place in the Church other than as celibate individuals as unhappy with life as the bitter old queens at the Vatican.  The fall out of the synod on the family and now a meeting between Francis and leading American hate group leaders only underscores my hesitance to join the ranks of those in near orgasm over a few phrases that have been uttered by Francis.  The reality is that NOTHING has changed vis-a-vis the Church's official position on gays or to rescind the "inherently disordered" language in offical documents signed by Francis' predecessor, the Nazi Pope.  A column in The Daily Beast even suggests that Francis is now back peddling further on the issue of gays.  Here are highlights:

Pope Francis is not Jesus Christ. Or even Martin Luther.

He may well transform the Catholic Church, and has already gained unprecedented popularity as the reformer we’ve all been waiting for. But as events this week confirm, he is not omnipotent, and does not intend to change fundamental Catholic doctrine—if he even could.

The event in question is “The Complementarity of Man and Woman: An International Colloquium,” an interreligious symposium presented by some of the Vatican’s most conservative voices. To understand the significance of Pope Francis’s remarks at this bizarre event, it’s necessary to back up a bit.

You may have noticed that roughly 100 percent of higher animals reproduce sexually, requiring a male and female partner to do so. This is the core of “complementarity,” and it would not seem to require an international colloquium to explain.

Complementarity as conservative Catholics use the term, however, is more than biology. It stands for the proposition that the biological basis of procreation should also be the sole organizing principle of society. Only mating pairs constitute a family, and any configuration that is not a mating pair—divorced people, gay people, single people—are not to be legitimized. 

Sex is not for fun; sex is for procreation. Food is not for fun; food is for nourishment. In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas, the most important Catholic Natural Law thinker, called any “misuse” of sensual pleasures luxuria—not just luxury in the contemporary sense, but decadent luxury, pleasure beyond purpose. Evil.

A great deal of that money goes to imposing its view of Natural Law on the rest of us, spending billions to restrict abortion and contraception, and fight any recognition of same-sex (“unnatural”) couples.

Now, wasn’t Pope Francis going to change all that?  No. Never.

[A]n evolution in tone is not a change in doctrine. Essentially, Pope Francis is urging Christians to “love the sinner, but hate the sin.”

Which brings us back to this week’s colloquium, presented by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—originally known (until 1908) as the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition.” Yes, that Inquisition.

The CDF has, for five centuries, been a bastion of Catholic conservatism, and today is no exception. It was headed for 20 years by Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who produced such gems as labeling gay people “intrinsically disordered.”
So, while the Colloquium is presented as a neutral, and interreligious, conference on the beauty of traditional marriage . . . its real-world impact would be to deny secular legal status to anyone who does not fit is conception of “complementarity.”

“Complementarity,” like “family values,” “religious liberty,” and “traditional marriage” is a term defined by what it opposes—non-procreative sex, same-sex unions, contraception, and usually (though not always) feminism.

Where is Pope Francis in all of this?

First, in his opening remarks yesterday, the pontiff towed a much more conservative line than his legion of new fans might expect. “The complementarity of man and woman,” he said:

is a root of marriage and family… We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment. This revolution in manners and morals has often flown the flag of freedom, but in fact it has brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.”

[P]erhaps Pope Francis is not the pope of progressives’ fantasies after all.  Even if he is, though, the pope may be infallible, but he is not omnipotent. As this week’s gathering shows, there are powerful conservative forces within the Catholic Church and beyond it. And for every encomium to the harmonious, procreative union of male and female, there is a trampling of everyone else.