Pope Francis had such promise. He tried to break barriers. He's still trying.
Back in March, he met with an imam of the Shi'ite sect of Islam in Iraq. Just going to Iraq was an act of courage. It's still not a very safe place. We can give him credit for that ecumenism.
But gay marriage? Still too far to go. He says priests can't bless that sacrament if two people of the same gender wish to partake. He still calls it "sinful."
So if some Catholics are gay--and some are--they can't get married in their church. Because he says so. Not a match made in heaven, I guess.
It's nice to have someone at the top to make policy and, after all, Francis was elected by a slew of Cardinals like other popes before him and installed for life. But it's the height of pretentiousness to say that he's God's vicar on earth.
Granted, he's succeeded in a line rather interrupted here and there, but a line it is, going back to St. Peter, who was handed the governance of the Catholic Church by Jesus of Nazareth himself, or so the Christian bible says, after Jesus was to have risen from the dead and just before ascending, or at least disappearing, into heaven, if there is one. Or so is the belief.
If that's true and everyone naturally respected that, there would have been no Reformation, no split of the Christian church. Everyone who believes in Christianity would naturally be Roman Catholic.
But the church corrupted itself, selling dispensation for sins before the sinners actually committed the offenses, guaranteeing forgiveness as a bank account from which people could successfully draw while making plans to undermine others in prearranged justifiability. There was something really cockeyed about that, and Martin Luther, among others, blew the whistle.
The Church was neither above punishment for those who would challenge the existing order of thought, especially in regard to science, which as we know rearranged the universe in a way that begged a new place for God to exist--and thus left open God's existence at all.'
Copernicus was the first, putting the sun at the center of the solar system, which blew up the religious teaching that God was just beyond the sky with heavenly noises going off all around him (and it had to be a him). Then Galileo said he could prove that everything in the sky was moving, including all the stars and planets, without figuring out, for the moment, what kept them from crashing into each other. It implied a randomness that was understandably unsettling.
It possibly presaged the end of the world because who knew at what moment some planet would come crashing into ours and stop the collections at Sunday Mass? So they made him recant so they could say he did and the truth, according to them, would remain 'official'. But he got up from his knees and said, albeit quietly, but it moves.
So he was put under house arrest for the rest of his life and buried in an unmarked grave. There. That would be fair warning for those seeking the truth.
Pope Francis can't do that anymore. We've gotten beyond making the church the vehicle of civil government. Sinners can run countries, whether they want to admit it or not. We just had one who wouldn't admit it, and now have another who admits it very quickly.
So if people love each other and want to actually codify that through marriage, whether straight or not, the state can now guarantee that through legal action. Pope Francis can, if he wants, declare such an act sinful, but nobody has to listen to him.
So the only solution to this Catholic dilemma, it seems to me, is for gay people to not be Catholic anymore. The pope can therefore keep his neighborhood clean of riff-raff, driving it toward other sects.
If that's what he wants, he will succeed. I can't believe that all gay Catholics will now remain. There are other Christian sects who can receive them, and they aren't bothered a bit. I stopped listening a long time ago. My decision to become Presbyterian looks better by the day.
Funny thing: Not long ago, the pope wrote a book called The Name of God Is Mercy. Now, what did he mean by that? Did he mean that he felt sorry for those claiming to be gay, but still declares them sinners although God forgives them nonetheless?
Isn't intolerance a sin, by the way? Or are there certain things that cannot be tolerated, which there are? And is gayness one of those things, along with murder and deception and theft and (especially) sexually abusing young kids?
I've been on this planet a while, but there are questions I'll never be able to answer. What hurts the world, though, should not be tolerated. If it doesn't hurt the world, it should be allowed.
I don't see how gay marriage hurts the world. We aren't being overrun by it or anything; at least nine out of ten people are straight anyhow. An official, legal declaration that two people love each other, regardless of derivation, can't be a bad thing.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
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