Pope Francis: A 'global war' seeks to destroy marriage. A few days ago in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, the Pope gave an almost perfect illustration of how the Catholic Church is completely incapable of reforming itself without giving up being the Catholic Church.
He reportedly told an audience of priests and seminarians that there is a 'global war to destroy marriage'. He was of course referring to moves to legalise same-sex marriage and so give equal human rights to homosexual couples rather than to stigmatise, persecute and deny basic rights to them as the church would prefer.
So what has happened to Pope Francis' proclaimed desire to reach out and be more inclusive to homosexuals? It's been defeated by the old guard which, maybe better than Pope Francis, understands that to rescind basic dogma and discard centuries of church teaching is to admit that the church was wrong. And that calls into question the entire doctrine of papal infallibility and the 'eternal truth of God's revealed word'.
Dogma that can be abandoned for the sake of keeping those currently flooding away from the Catholic Church because of its continued persecution of minorities, shows a church ready and willing to abandon principle for the sake of popularity. This may reflect the current reality that the church exists in a marketplace for ideas but it sits badly with a hierarchical and autocratic establishment more used to telling people what to believe, declaring truth by fiat and ensuring compliance with threats of ostracisation.
A cult that depends on an in-group versus out-group mentality needs to actively identify external 'threats' to protect itself from and ensure cohesion and compliance, so what's the point of 'reaching out to' and 'embracing' these threatening minorities? Best keep them at a distance and dehumanise them, the better to attack and persecute them! Then you can present yourself as the defenders of something sacred from the forces of evil storming the barricades.
The Catholic Church, even more so than other Christian sects, and probably on a par with Islam in this regard, resembles a sex cult for the sexually dysfunctional. The sexual ambiguity, confusion, and ensuing feelings of guilt of the priesthood is revealed as much by their public homophobia and obsession with sex as by their private homosexuality, paedophilia and frequently predatory sexuality. Priests and nuns who willingly (at least publically) adopt a celibate life-style believing this will somehow make them 'pure' are trying to cope with something for which therapy would probably be more appropriate and effective - a mental condition brought on by their sex-obsessed cult in the first place.The Pope's attack on the liberalisation of marriage and what amounts to taking the institution of marriage away from the church and handing it back to a secular, increasingly inclusive, society, illustrates the arrogance of the Catholic Church underpinning its assumption of supreme authority over people and their institutions. It also amounts to his admission of defeat over his attempts to reform the Catholic Church and give it a kinder face. He has now retreated behind the stockades and is seeing an increasingly liberal and tolerant, kinder and more inclusive world, as a threat, and moves to take away his church's privileges to persecute and victimise the minorities of its choice, as as waging war. It's time to pull up the drawbridge, drop the portcullis and prepare for the siege.
And so the Catholic Church will remain mired in the Middle Ages, paralysed with fear of reform because reform means giving up Medieval superstitions. The tide of history has turned and the Catholic Church is being swept away along with the other detritus of a pre-scientific, fearful, demon-haunted world where magic held sway.
'via Blog this'
I've always been exasperated by the liberals who swoon over this guy. It suggests a willingness to throw certain issues -- the ones where he hasn't liberalized significantly, notably contraception and abortion -- under the bus. Even on gays, his softening has mostly been on the level of rhetoric, with very little change on offer in the substance of dogma. Now, evidently, he's back to trying to use gays as a bogeyman to scare the flock into line.
ReplyDeleteMorally I see no improvement over previous Popes. He continues to endorse and participate in obviously-fake miracles (you've posted about this), and he still hasn't made it Church policy to turn over suspected child-molesting priests to the civil police instead of handling such cases through the Church's own ridiculous internal procedures.
The gays-as-bogeyman thing is never going to work the way it used to, though. Too many people now know at least one or two open gay people personally. You can't demonize Uncle Fred or Sally in Accounting the way you could with some distant, faceless mass of people. I wonder if he realizes that.
I don't think he can. How can he reverse centuries of doctrine without facing the charge that doctrine is no guarantee of rightness or that the 'revealed word of God' as declared by the Pope was er... wrong. As I've said before, the Catholic Church is being left behind as public morality moves on and modernises. It either has to stop being Catholic or lose followers because Catholics are stopping being Catholics in ever-increasing numbers.
DeleteFrancis has to watch his back or he could end up like Pope John Paul I, born Albino Luciani. Served as Pope from 26 August 1978 till his suspicious sudden death 33 days later.
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