11mo ago

Pope Francis: I don’t bless a ‘homosexual marriage.’ I bless two people who love each other.

www.americamagazine.org Pope Francis: I don’t bless a ‘homosexual marriage.’ I bless two people who love each other.

In a recent interview with an Italian magazine, Pope Francis provided more comments on “Fiducia Supplicans,” highlighting the hypocrisy behind those shocked that a priest would bless a gay couple but have no problem with him blessing a crooked businessman.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- People who act shocked that a priest would bless a gay couple but have no problem with him blessing a crooked businessman are hypocrites, Pope Francis said.

“The most serious sins are those that are disguised with a more ‘angelic’ appearance. No one is scandalized if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people, which is a very serious sin. Whereas they are scandalized if I give it to a homosexual -- this is hypocrisy,” he told the Italian magazine Credere.

The interview was scheduled for publication Feb. 8, but Vatican News reported on some of its content the day before when the magazine issued a press release about the interview.

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still catholic. still the pope. no matter how progressive he may seem.
- I mean....yeah? Did you think progress was going to come from the outside? Someone's gotta make an effort to steer the ship the right way.
  
  Right? Credit where credit's due
  
  What do you think would happen if he just came out and blessed gay marriage?
  
  They’d claim he’s possessed by a demon and disappear him.
  
  There'd be a schism, with the people who are currently getting upset instead just up and leaving. That might seem like a good thing, at first, but if the goal is to get everyone to heaven, you're not really achieving it if half the people are leaving.
  I mean, you could say that you're not achieving it either way, but that's the thinking anyhow.
  
  heaven isn’t real. literally all he has to do is come out and say “had a chat with god, turns out it was all a big misunderstanding. i bless gay marriage because being gay is ok!” the bar is so very low for him.
  
  Regardless, I'm fairly sure he would disagree with you, and I was discussing his motivations.
  
  yeah because he’s a stupid, evil man. this is very easy for him.
  
  I try to be more generous than that when considering other people's motivations, even those whose actions I find despicable.
  It obviously doesn't excuse despicable actions, but it does give the opportunity to recognize when people are trying to be better.
  
  I hold leaders to a higher standard. you should too.
  
  riiiiight. the pope would be insurrectioned. sure.
  
  I’m rooting for the little guy! maybe he can work his way up to a mortal position with some leverage.
  
  Progress won't come from any Christianity (and likely almost any religion, but I don't know others well enough to comment). They will either need to denounce the book as being bullshit and decide to progress or they will continue to hold society behind.
  
  It's worth mentioning that during the dark ages, it was actually monks who preserved history and scientific knowledge, and advanced it. Even afterwards, Mendelian genetics was discovered by Gregor Mendel, a friar and abbot.
  On top of that though, a lot of scientific knowledge and mathematics was preserved and cultivated by Islamic empires concurrent to the dark ages. They were in the middle of a golden age and progressed those fields further.
  The problem isn't so much religion in itself, but evangelicals and literalists who put it above everything else. Zealots ruin it all.
  
  Yeah, the Catholic Church guarded access to education, preventing the rest of the commoners from learning how poorly they translated the Bible to maintain control of the people. It's too bad the Protestant movement didn't destroy the Catholic Church.
  
  You really need to see what progress has come through Christianity to see how absurd your statement is LOL.
  
  You mean despite of Christianity.
  The book is bigger than at its base. Our society cannot progress without removing it from a focal point.
  
  The Catholic Church has sponsored plenty of progressive endeavors, both in the fields of science and otherwise. Which is to say nothing of the numerous Catholic people who have done progressive things and would place their faith as their reason for doing so. So there is a lot of progress that has been made because of the church.
  That being said, there have also been far too many times where the church deliberately resisted important progress and/or attempted to undo it, hence progress despite the church.
  I don't know where the balance lies on that, but I do think it's worth acknowledging both and even moreso acknowledging attempts from within to ensure more of the former and less of the latter.
  
  Yes, for several hundred years, monks were the largest literate social group in Europe. Libraries and the invention of book printing would never have become so large without monasteries and the church.
  In those times, science wasn't per se in opposition to the church, that is a relatively modern approach.
- Fucks sake im so tired of you jaded militant shitbirds. It is constantly 120% with you fucks. Its always "agree with my personal breakdown of reality and morality or you are all complete garbage" nonsense. Progress doesnt happen on your schedule you shithead.
  Nuance and context motherfucker. Do you understand it?
  
  Man, I thought I was on crazy pills with the lack of nuance here. Everything is black and white with no room for gray or context…
  I’m digging the past few days. There have been a number of posts and comments calling it out. The fact that your comment has positive upvotes is a good sign and surprising.
  
  He is the current leader of a 2000 year old pedophile ring (the largest to ever exist) that owns its own gold plated city/country.
  Fuck off with this defense of traditional bullshit. Progress doesn't happen in tiny steps, it happens all at once with violence and bloodshed. Have you learned nothing from history?
  
  Agreed. The pope should keep his mouth shut when it comes to ethics. He's sitting on a throne of dead bodies.
- There's no progressive religion (I am not including Buddhism). They all say that their religion promotes peace and tolerance but they still believe in what written in their sacred book and won't change a thing.
  
  Even the Buddhists are committing a genocide against Muslims in Myanmar.
  
  Im pretty sure even fighting in a war at gunpoint is not a Buddhist to thing to do. Genocide definitely disqualified you. Though culturally and religious Buddhist are two different things. The Buddha basically told everyone not to worship him and make him a religious figure and every sect of Buddhism just kind of turned around and did it anyway. Their justification is "lol". So like. I dunno. Buddhism kind of accepts that everything anyone can or will do is something they've done. And existence is suffering. Freeing yourself from attachment and embracing the moment with love and kindness is a person thing, and sure genociders may be cenociding other people but ultimately through a Buddhist lens they're harming themselves and straying further from enlightenment in the here and now.
  Nothing really like MATTERS for a Buddhist in the big picture sense. We live, we do things, we die, ultimately none of it comes to anything. There's no one watching over you to punish you or praise you, and nothing for you after you die but more of this through a different lens or to finally be done with the bullshit and leave it all behind..
  It's a doctrine for being happy NOW. Follow it, don't, ultimately you're the only person it matters to.
  
  Buddhism is absolutely not “a doctrine for being happy now”. This statement makes it sound like you don’t even have a cursory understanding of Buddhism. Likewise with “nothing really matters for a Buddhist in the big picture sense”.
  
  Sounds like the Satanic Temple don't it?
  
  While the general idea of Buddhism is pretty nice, there are some highly questionable aspects like women being impure by birth, and not being able to achieve Nirvana (eternal peace/heaven) either through rough tribulations or doing enough good to be born as a man.
  Of course it's impossible to check if it was Buddha who said it, or it was added later by his people, but the above is something that isn't discussed much imo.
  
  https://thesatanictemple.com/blogs/the-satanic-temple-tenets/there-are-seven-fundamental-tenets
  
  Yer name is not checkin out here tbh
  
  Faith is actually a mechanism to ensure change keeps happening. It suspends the “sealing off” of the mind that replaces sensory input with projected theory.
  Buddhism uses presence for the same function abrahamic religions use faith. It’s a source of noise to keep the conceptual structure from gaslighting the adherent into being unable to see what’s in front of them.
  
  Faith is actually a mechanism to ensure change keeps happening. It suspends the “sealing off” of the mind that replaces sensory input with projected theory.
  Motherfucker. What do you think religious doctrine is and faith in it does.
  Buddhism uses presence for the same function abrahamic religions use faith.
  Buddhism, if you drill down into the monastic core, is introspective psychology. It has much more in common at that level with what's considered philosophy in the western tradition, in particular Stoicism. It arrived at that knowledge during an initially productive scientific phase, meaning theorising and experimenting, later on alas it fell away from that and various groups fell back into that exact sealing off you mentioned, not investigating any more but accepting the map of the territory they read in monastery school as the territory. Religious innovation generally follows that kind of repeating pattern over quite long time-spans.
  It’s a source of noise to keep the conceptual structure from gaslighting the adherent into being unable to see what’s in front of them.
  You could also, you know, just be sceptical. Heck, even be a capital-S Sceptic them and the Stoics disagreed on like exactly one point which from a certain POV is semantics.
  ...not to mention that that's not how the mind works. It's not how life works. If you want entropy then it's going to come from the outside, everything about life itself is geared towards minimising entropy on the inside, at the expense of accelerating its progression on the outside. (Yes the purpose of life is to hasten the heat-death of the universe, different topic). What may seem like internal randomness to you is merely your degrees of freedom doing their thing, the capacity to react to the same external stimulus in different ways depending on your internal state. It's a chaotic system (and overall you are) but it's definitely not noise, not from the POV of the organism itself: It is not subject to it, but is employing it.
  If, OTOH, all you wanted to say is "hey I found a way to stop walking into lamp posts and I describe it like..." then first off congratulations, keep up the good work, but also I don't care about your half-arsed theory. Maybe if you didn't connect it up with the concept of noise it would've at least ended up being internally consistent. Keep not having theories if you want to see actual freedom from that conceptual stuff. Maybe investigate why you felt the need to to explain the experience instead of taking it at face value.
- Don't you think a progressive pope can do a lot of good though especially compared to a traditionalist pope?
  
  how hard is it to bless something, really? wake me up when he’s an ally.
- Yup. If you’re a Catholic and find yourself disagreeing with the Pope that’s a good moment to practice a little humility.

210 comments