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Vatican Say Gay is Okay!

Nice Squirrel said:
Using strikingly open language, a new Vatican report says the church should welcome and appreciate gays, and offers a solution for divorced and remarried Catholics who want to receive Communion.
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I notice they're still not accepting gay marriage as being equal to real marriages.

October 13th, 2014
11:09 AM ET
Share this on: Facebook Twitter Digg del.icio.us reddit MySpace StumbleUpon Vatican proposes 'stunning' shift on gays, lesbians
By Delia Gallagher, CNN

ROME (CNN) – Using strikingly open language, a new Vatican report says the church should welcome and appreciate gays, and offers a solution for divorced and remarried Catholics who want to receive Communion.

At a press conference on Monday to present the report, Cardinal Louis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines said Catholic clergy meeting here have largely focused on the impact of poverty, war and immigration on families.

But the newly proposed language on gays and civil marriages represents a “pastoral earthquake,” said one veteran Vatican journalist.

“Regarding homosexuals, it went so far as to pose the question whether the church could accept and value their sexual orientation without compromising Catholic doctrine,” said John Thavis, a former Rome bureau chief for Catholic News Service.

The Rev. James Martin, an author and Jesuit priest, called the report's language on gays and lesbians "revolutionary."

“This is a stunning change in the way that the Catholic Church speaks about gay people.”

"The synod said that gay people have 'gifts and talents to offer the Christian community.' This is something that even a few years ago would have been unthinkable," Martin added.

The Catholic Catechism calls homosexual acts “intrinsically disordered” and calls on gays and lesbians to live in chastity. Under Pope Benedict XVI, the church had tried to purge men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from the priesthood.

But Pope Francis, while hewing to Catholic teaching, has signaled a gentler tone, famously saying in 2013 "Who am I to judge?" gays and lesbians. The report released on Monday, a summary of a week of closed-door discussions of nearly 200 bishops, cardinals and priests, together with Pope Francis, continues that trend.

The discussions continue this week and a final report will be issued at the end of the week.

The goal of this meeting, officially called the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family, is to present working proposals for a larger meeting to be held next October 2015.

Here’s a summary of where the church may be heading on hot-button issues.

Gays and lesbians

The report firmly re-states the Catholic Church’s position that marriage is between a man and a woman and therefore, “unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between a man and a woman.”

However it notes that, there are examples of good gay relationships “in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of partners.”

The report states:

“Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community. Are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?”

But this one worries me:
The report adds that the church should pay "special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasizing that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority.
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i fear that they'll decide one of the 'needs' of the little ones is to make sure they're not drawn into the homosexual lifestyle. That they have a 'right' to know that God doesn't really approve of what their parents are doing....
 
Interesting to see the Church evolve to stay relevant and maintain power. It's a good thing.
 
rousseau said:
Interesting to see the Church evolve to stay relevant and maintain power. It's a good thing.
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IT is a good thing that the Church is using less of its power for evil, but its not a good thing that it will help them maintaining their power. They will wind up using that retained power in the future to do harm. It would be a better thing if they lost the power entirely since their inherent authoritarianism makes them an inherent threat to future moral and scientific progress. IOW, it would be nice if the Church continued to chase after secular moral progress to stay relevant but still failed in this pursuit and people realized that religion is not the source of moral progress and did not return or stay with the church just because it is pandering.
 
doubtingt said:
rousseau said:
Interesting to see the Church evolve to stay relevant and maintain power. It's a good thing.
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IT is a good thing that the Church is using less of its power for evil, but its not a good thing that it will help them maintaining their power. They will wind up using that retained power in the future to do harm. It would be a better thing if they lost the power entirely since their inherent authoritarianism makes them an inherent threat to future moral and scientific progress. IOW, it would be nice if the Church continued to chase after secular moral progress to stay relevant but still failed in this pursuit and people realized that religion is not the source of moral progress and did not return or stay with the church just because it is pandering.
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Yea, even better would be the pope coming out and saying: "there is no evidence of any Christian claims", but I'll take what I can get.
 
rousseau said:
doubtingt said:
IT is a good thing that the Church is using less of its power for evil, but its not a good thing that it will help them maintaining their power. They will wind up using that retained power in the future to do harm. It would be a better thing if they lost the power entirely since their inherent authoritarianism makes them an inherent threat to future moral and scientific progress. IOW, it would be nice if the Church continued to chase after secular moral progress to stay relevant but still failed in this pursuit and people realized that religion is not the source of moral progress and did not return or stay with the church just because it is pandering.
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Yea, even better would be the pope coming out and saying: "there is no evidence of any Christian claims", but I'll take what I can get.
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I realize in some ways this is good for homosexuals, but its a double edged sword. If more people left the Church because they continued their homophobic hate, then less people would suffer for the other ways the Church uses its power for harm. When an evil power make superficial accommodation to avoid loss of power in general, the short term benefit of their accommodation may be offset by added harm they due to that loss of power. IOW, who or how will people suffer tomorrow because of the power the church retained today by its reactionary and non-heartfelt compromise today? When an evil institution sincerely becomes less evil that is good. When they only engage in PR to retain their ability to do evil, it might not be a net long term "good thing". This seems more like the latter.
 
ZiprHead said:
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I think the pope this time seems to be a fairly humane guy, but I think the RCC has a long history of bullshit and murder and destruction of whole societies to face. In a way, this is just a warm seeming guy welcoming all the stray sheep back to the land of church bullshit, obedience and TITHES. It means nothing to me.
 
They welcome gays as long as they don't sin by like...acting gay.
 
credoconsolans said:
They welcome gays as long as they don't sin by like...acting gay.
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Come now! Let's not be questioning or doubting god's representative on earth. This is a false easing of tension. Gays better keep their asses away from there if they know what is good for them. This RCC has a habit of taking terrible turns for the worse, depending on just which asshole gets to be pope.

I was shocked when the last pope "forgave" someone they burned at the stake in 1601 (Giordana Bruno) for heresy. They FORGAVE HIM HIS sin of DOUBTING THEM? Something seems awfully awry with this outfit. They forgave him because they murdered him....just doesn't quite fit in my brain!
 
Do they have a messed-up calendar and think it's the first of April??
 
The point of this "new tone" is to appease western liberals without changing the basic dogma of the church in any way.
 
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