Which Jews would be the ones that don’t change God? The Reform, The Orthodox or The Conservative? The ones that are allowed to have multiple wives, or wasn’t that prohibited 1000 years ago now? The ones that do or don’t make sacrifices? (None currently make sacrifices.) The ones that claim to be priests? Or just the rabbis? The ones that are atheists? Or the ones that believe that God marks even the fall of a sparrow? The ones that believe there is no God before God? The ones that believe Jews must not worship any other God? The ones that believe there is no other God? The ones that cut their beards, or the ones that are clean shaven who think that the Hasidim are off their nut? The ones that won’t leave the part of town marked with a thin wire overhead, or the ones that travel the world daily? The ones that all agree on the exact meaning of each scripture, or the ones that have developed a tradition of debate and respect for opposing views on each passage of scripture?
You could spend a lifetime learning the different cultural values and beliefs and non-beliefs of different Jews.
I agree completely with your interpretation of this problem. And it reaches the central problem of the modern and public face of Christianity in the US. All sin is sin as far as theology goes. But culture necessarily divides some sins and makes them worse. Some are terrible crimes (murder) and some are party activities (public drunkenness). Institutionally the prominent Christian churches have put themselves in the public eye for at least my lifetime by railing against abortion, men having sex with each other, young people fornicating (or old people for that matter), divorces, etc. Jesus’ main message was for people to treat each other lovingly in all matters, to not cast the first stone, to feed the hungry and heal the sick. This message of compassion gets lost.
The RCC Pope is the most prominent Christian in the world. He leads by example and words. This guy is setting a much better example and offering far more comfort than the last two. It is true he hasn’t changed any theology or any rules. But he has changed the focus of the message to being kind from dwelling on sin.
Because worldwide perceptions do not turn on a dime. The pope can’t just say “accept gays” and have it happen. But to say “hey, lets spend a lot less time and energy trashing gays” is a step. When people hear less trash talk, they will start to change their perceptions. It will be slow - with the size of the RCC and the distance from intolerance to acceptance that a huge organization needs to move it might take a century - but the journey is starting.
Moving attitudes in a large organization is almost a physics problem. If you are China or North Korea, you can apply a lot of force to get faster change, but the RCC lost that sort of leverage about 400 or 500 years ago. So they are going to have to take an approach that looks more like water eroding stone.
Right. He’s not changing the Teaching, he’s saying “we should remember we have a primary mandate about love and caring, and give primary focus to THAT”. Plus the whole thing about it being God who’ll actually do the judging no matter what the humans say.
As has been pointed out, the majority of the world’s Catholics are NOT in Western European/Anglo-American countries. And he knows by direct experience it’s too easy to project the message that “as long as you are hardline against abortion and gays (and in its time, communism), you’re in good standing” while letting other social injustices go on unchallenged and unattended.
Pope Francis: "A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’
In the article, he is saying what I, personally, believe. A small subset of conservative Catholics have turned the Church into a bully pulpit against one or two singular issues, and that narrow focus has completely overshadowed Jesus’ message about love and compassion. They don’t recognize that THEY are the scribes and Pharisees that Jesus detested, because they, too, used the “rules” to justify their own bigotry and hatred.
I just don’t see this as a step towards making the church more accepting of gays, i see it as a step towards making the public more accepting of the church by not talking about their unpopular views.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think not talking about their unpopular views so much would still be a benefit. I think there is a benefit, culturally, to shunning certain speech/views and forcing people who want to say them/hold them to work harder to find like-minded souls, and to work harder to push their message across.
If you aren’t talking a “Down with the gays!” message, fewer people get a “Down with the gays!” message. If you force people to use code, some of the intended audience won’t even be able to decode it.
Heck, that’s what happened with the RCC and the poor. In the US, the church has been so focused on abortion and gays that the message to help the poor was hardly being said, and certainly wasn’t getting through. “Down with the gays! Down with abortion! Oh, poverty is kinda bad, too, I guess.”
If the RCC forces the Jerome Corsis and the Bill Donohues to carry their own message and doesn’t make it easy for them by letting them piggyback on the church’s message, those jerks will be less persuasive and will reach fewer people. And more of the people they reach will say, “But my pastor says…” instead of, “You are so right, in fact my pastor says…”
I don’t see his actions thus far as relevant to meaningful change. He’s probably a pretty upstanding guy especially compared with his immediate predecessor, but homosexual behavior and use of birth control continues to be a sin in the eyes of the church, and many nations will continue to have such behavior be criminal due in at least part to the church’s positions.
We’ve had a summer cottage on a huge manmade lake in Kentucky since I was born. It’s a dry county. Back in the 70s, Water Patrol would routinely stop and ticket boaters who had beer on board. Didn’t matter if they were drunk or rowdy; if they had liquor, they were ticketed. As you can imagine, this practice was very unpopular with the boaters, and they protested loudly.
Rumor has it that Martha Layne Collins came into office and realized that the heavy-handed tactics were driving people out of her state, and with it their tourism dollars. So an edict was handed down to stop the vigilante enforcement.
Content that they could have their beer on board again without being harassed, boaters returned in full force. We’ve been boating with beer on board without incidence since.
Now, it’s obvious to anyone that the governor was looking only at the state’s best interests when she told them to stop the enforcement. However, from the POV of the boaters, it didn’t matter. Lack of enforcement is implicit acceptance.
A papal directive to stop condemning the gays is, for all intents and purposes, an indirect way of telling people to accept it. Even if you think his message is 100% self-serving (which I do not), it is STILL a step in the direction of acceptance and tolerance.
Oh, BTW, that lake town is now half-wet. It only took ~40 years. Baby steps.
Priests baptize illegitimate children all the time. There is no canon law against it as far as I know. There is a proscription against baptizing a child against it’s parents will, which is maybe what the mother-to-be was worried about. A priest refusing to baptize the child without the father’s consent.
That’s essentially what he did. Think about it for a second. If this woman brings her baby to him and he says “Which of my priests refused to baptize your baby my child?” do you think ANY priest wants their name to be on her lips? He didn’t do it with pomp and circumstance and an Ex Cathedra declaration, but I’d argue the effect will be the same.
True. That’s because it’s a hard life. But it’s the attraction of setting oneself apart from a society that has brought a person little but pain. People who are already satisfied with the secular world don’t seek religion beyond what they grew up with. People who have been let down by the “real” world want an escape, and getting caught up in the whole life of being something completely different from what you were can be attractive. Mainline churches don’t offer that experience.