Church of God News

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The BBC reported the following:

Pope suggests Catholic Church could bless same-sex couples

October 3, 2023

Pope Francis has suggested he would be open to having the Catholic Church bless same-sex couples.

Responding to a group of cardinals who asked him for clarity on the issue, he said any request for a blessing should be treated with “pastoral charity”.

“We cannot be judges who only deny, reject, and exclude,” he said.

He added, however, that the Church still considered same-sex relationships “objectively sinful” and would not recognise same-sex marriage. …

In the Catholic Church, a blessing is a prayer or plea, usually delivered by a minister, asking that God look favourably on the person or people being blessed.

Bishops in a number of countries, including Belgium and Germany, have begun to allow priests to bless same-sex couples, but the position of Church authorities remained unclear. … Appearing to suggest that requests for blessings should be considered on a case-by-case basis, he said that “decisions that may be part of pastoral prudence in certain circumstances should not necessarily become a norm”. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66991427

Furthermore, Pope Francis made some comments related to being more accepting of sexual immorality in an interview:

January 25, 2023

Vatican City — Pope Francis criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust,” saying God loves all his children just as they are and called on Catholic bishops who support the laws to welcome LGBTQ people into the church.

“Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” Francis said during an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Francis acknowledged that Catholic bishops in some parts of the world support laws that criminalize homosexuality or discriminate against the LGBTQ community, and he himself referred to the issue in terms of “sin.” But he attributed such attitudes to cultural backgrounds, and said bishops in particular need to undergo a process of change to recognize the dignity of everyone.

“These bishops have to have a process of conversion,” he said, adding that they should apply “tenderness, please, as God has for each one of us.” …

Francis quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church in saying gay people must be welcomed and respected, and should not be marginalized or discriminated against. …

Starting with his famous 2013 declaration, “Who am I to judge?” when he was asked about a purportedly gay priest, Francis has gone on to minister repeatedly and publicly to the gay and trans community. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he favored granting legal protections to same-sex couples as an alternative to endorsing gay marriage, which Catholic doctrine forbids. https://www.voanews.com/a/pope-francis-homosexuality-not-a-crime-/6933125.html

It is interesting, to me at least, that Pope Francis seems to be doubting the conversion of some of his church’s bishops. In theory, a bishop should be a converted person who believes and teaches the faith. As far as welcoming them, practicing homosexuals need to at least be striving to stop sinning to be properly welcomed in church.

As far as condoning homosexuality goes, notice what the Apostle Paul wrote from a Roman Catholic translation of the Bible:

26 For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature.

27 And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.

28 And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient;

29 Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers,

30 Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

31 Foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.

32 Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Romans 1:25-32, Douay-Rheims)

Furthermore, early Christian leaders, after the New Testament was written, including the second century Polycarp of Smyrna and Melito of Sardis –which the the Church of Rome consider to be saints–clearly condemned homosexuality:

Knowing, then, that “God is not mocked,” we ought to walk worthy of His commandment and glory …For it is well that they should be cut off from the lusts that are in the world, since “every lust warreth against the spirit; ” and “neither fornicators, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, shall inherit the kingdom of God,” nor those who do things inconsistent and unbecoming (Polycarp. Letter to the Philippians, Chapter V. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 1as edited by Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson. American Edition, 1885).

53. But in addition to this there were to be found among men many things still more monstrous and terrifying and brutal: father cohabits with his child, and son and with his mother, and brother with sister, and male with male, (Melito’s Homily on the Passover)

Polycarp was appointed a church leader by the original apostles, knew the scriptures of the New Testament, and opposed homosexuality–and that was not based on Rome’s misunderstanding of science.

The original catholic church clearly did not condone nor bless homosexual relations.

Sadly, the Church of Rome has long had a problem with homosexuality and other sexual sins in its clergy. A report from 2018 claimed that 1/3 of Catholic priests were active homosexuals and another 1/3 were active heterosexuals (see ‘Pope adviser urges rethink on Catholic celibacy’ Two-thirds of Catholic priests reportedly are NOT celibate). And of course according to the Vatican’s supposed rules, there are to be none in either category.

Here are some quotes from the book In The Closet of the Vatican put online by the National Catholic Reporter:

‘He’s of the parish,’ the priest whispers conspiratorially in my ear.

The first person who used that coded expression in front of me was an archbishop from the Roman Curia.

‘You know, he’s very practising. He’s of the parish,’ he stressed in a low voice, talking to me about the morals of a famous Vatican cardinal, a former ‘minister’ of John Paul II, who both of us knew well. …

About forty cardinals and hundreds of bishops, monsignori, priests and ‘nuncios’ (the pope’s ambassadors) agreed to meet me. Among them, alleged homosexuals, who were present in the Vatican every day, introduced me to their world of initiates. …

I installed myself in Rome, one week every month, regularly inside the Vatican, thanks to the hospitality of senior prelates who sometimes revealed that they too were ‘part of the parish’. And then I travelled across the world, through more than thirty countries, among the clergies of Latin America, Asia, the United States and the Middle East, to collect over a thousand statements. During that long investigation I spent more than a hundred and fifty nights a year reporting, away from home, away from Paris. …

The best-kept secret of the Vatican is no secret to Pope Francis. He knows his ‘parish’. Since arriving in Rome he has known that he is dealing with an organisation that is quite extraordinary in its way, and that isn’t restricted, as people believed for a long time, to a few lost sheep. It’s a system; and a huge herd. How many are there? … Let’s just say: they represent the great majority. …

The Vatican has one of the biggest gay communities in the world, and I doubt whether, even in San Francisco’s Castro, the emblematic gay quarter, though more mixed today, there are quite as many gays! …

‘How much filth there is in the Church,’ said Cardinal Ratzinger, who also discovered the extent of the ‘closet’ through a secret report by three cardinals, the content of which was described to me and that was one of the major reasons for his resignation. This report is said to reveal not so much the existence of a ‘gay lobby’, as was said, as the omnipresence of homosexuals in the Vatican, blackmail and harassment built into the system. There is, as Hamlet might have said, something rotten in the state of the Vatican.

The homosexual sociology of Catholicism also helps us to explain another reality: the end of vocations in Europe. For a long time, as we will see, young Italians who discovered that they were homosexual, or who had doubts about their inclinations, chose the priesthood. …

Here is the pope: threatened and attacked on all sides and generally criticized, Francis is said to be ‘among the wolves’.

It’s not quite true: he’s among the queens. https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/excerpt-closet-vatican

Sexual immorality is a big problem for the Church of Rome.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023 at 8:00 am and is filed under Religious News.

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