[Catholic Caucus] Pope Francis says God loves homosexuals ‘as they are’ in new memoir

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Posted on 01/14/2025 4:30:14 PM PST by ebb tide

In his new memoirs, Pope Francis defended the controversial 2023 text Fiducia Supplicans and also appeared to suggest that there is no need for conversion away from the homosexual lifestyle.

Pope Francis with New Ways Ministry, October 2024.

Expanding his defense of the 2023 document approving blessing of same-sex couples, Pope Francis attested that such blessings are for “people” but “not the relationships.”

“It is the people who are blessed, not the relationships,” said Pope Francis of the blessings authorized by the controversial document Fiducia Supplicans.

Francis’ comments, found in his newly released memoir Hope, expand on his prior defense of the highly controversial document he signed, which stated that priests could offer blessings to couples of the same-sex.

“Receptiveness, and certainly not relativism, nor any change of doctrine, is the spirit and heart of Fiducia supplicans,” said Francis.

Released in December 2023, the document caused wide-spread consternation throughout the entire Church, and notable numbers of bishops rejecting the text. Demonstrating such resistance, emeritus prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) Cardinal Gerhard Müller wrote that “blessings” of homosexual couples constitute “blasphemy” and that the document is “self-contradictory.”

Indeed, only two years prior in 2021 the CDF stated clearly that the Church does not have “power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex.” The CDF wrote that it is “not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.”

But according to Francis in his memoir Hope, Fiducia’s approval of same-sex blessings “arises from the wish not to ascribe one situation or one condition to the entire life of those who seek to be illuminated and accompanied with a blessing.”

“Everyone in the Church is invited, including people who are divorced, including people who are homosexual, including people who are transgender,” he added, drawing on his now regular encounters with groups of transgender individuals at the Vatican. “The first time that a group of transgender people came to the Vatican, they left in tears, moved because I had taken their hands, had kissed them … As if I had done something exceptional for them. But they are daughters of God!”

It is unclear if Francis was referring to biological women, or men who live as “transgender women,” when he made this remark.

Francis has made similar defenses of Fiducia Supplicans on previous occasions, leading commentators to question how a differentiation can be made between blessing two people who present themselves for a blessing together as a couple, and blessing the couple as a couple.

The Catholic Church teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.” The Catechism is very clear that homosexual activity can never be approved, and repeats that “[h]omosexual persons are called to chastity.”

But for Francis, such blessing of homosexual couples is an example of “pastoral open-mindedness”:

It is strange that nobody worries about the blessing of an entrepreneur who exploits people, and this is a grave sin, or about someone who pollutes our common home, while there’s a public scandal if the pope blesses a divorced woman or a homosexual.

Opposition to pastoral open-mindedness often uncovers these hypocrisies.

God loves you as you are

Shortly before Fiducia Supplicans’ release, Francis issued another document with his CDF prefect, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, about transgender individuals. In an apparent violation of canon law and established Church teaching, the pair wrote that transgender people who had undergone a “sex change” could be godparents at baptism.

READ: Pope Francis says ‘trans’ people can be godparents, homosexual ‘parents’ can have children baptized

Alluding to this text, Francis wrote in Hope that transgender individuals “can receive baptism on the same conditions as other believers and can perform the responsibilities of godparents on the same conditions as others, and likewise be witnesses to a marriage.”

“No provision of canonical law forbids it,” he claimed.

READ: Pope Francis’ ‘transsexual’ baptisms document is even more radical than it seems

Decrying laws against homosexuality, which are particularly prevalent in African nations, Francis said that homosexuality “is a human fact” to which the Church must not respond “faintheartedly.”

The Pope also appeared to suggest that there is no need for conversion away from the homosexual lifestyle, since God “loves them as they are”:

God the Father loves them with the same unconditional love, He loves them as they are, and He accompanies them in the same way that He does with all of us, being close by, merciful, and tender.

Sexual sins

In 2016, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia infamously contained a passage allowing for the divorced and “re-married” to approach and receive Holy Communion. After widespread consternation and requests for clarification from leading lay theologians and cardinals, Francis then affirmed to the bishops of Buenos Aires that this was indeed the intention of the document and that there were “no other interpretations.”

This was condemned by theologians and then the four dubia cardinals as being in direct opposition to the Catholic faith.

READ: EXCLUSIVE: New cardinal says banning divorced, ‘re-married’ from Communion an ‘enormous injustice’

Writing in Hope, Francis decried “resistance” to the text as based on “inadequate knowledge or some form of hypocrisy.”

He described the document as simply opening “the doors for new pastoral challenges in regard to the family and that note on the possibility of divorced people having access to the sacraments.”

“Sexual sins,” he said, “tend to cause more of an outcry from some people. But they are really not the most serious. They are human sins, of the flesh.”

READ: What motivates Pope Francis’ attempts to normalize homosexual relationships?

On the contrary, he continued, “the most serious … are the sins that have more ‘angelicity,’ that dress themselves in another guise: pride, hatred, falsehood, fraud, abuse of power.”

Though Francis has claimed that Fiducia Supplicans and Amoris Laetitia “opened the doors” of the Church, they have led to numerous Catholics – lay and clerical – to accuse the Pontiff of endangering the faith and of promoting heresy. Notwithstanding this, Francis has remained committed to his agenda as he now approaches his twelfth anniversary of being pope.

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1 posted on 01/14/2025 4:30:14 PM PST by ebb tide

To: Al Hitan; Fedora; irishjuggler; Jaded; kalee; markomalley; miele man; Mrs. Don-o; ...

2 posted on 01/14/2025 4:30:52 PM PST by ebb tide (The Synodal "church" is not the Catholic Church.)

To: ebb tide

To: ebb tide

To: ebb tide

5 posted on 01/14/2025 4:35:10 PM PST by job

To: ebb tide

6 posted on 01/14/2025 4:42:33 PM PST by xxqqzz

To: Right_Wing_Madman

7 posted on 01/14/2025 4:42:39 PM PST by Leaning Right (It’s morning in America. Again.)

To: job

God loves the sinner, but hates the sin.
That’s what I learned.

8 posted on 01/14/2025 4:42:51 PM PST by GaltAdonis ( )

To: ebb tide

9 posted on 01/14/2025 4:44:08 PM PST by fidelis (Ecce Crucem Domini! Fugite partes adversae! Vicit Leo de tribu Juda, Radix David! Alleluia!)

To: ebb tide

10 posted on 01/14/2025 4:48:47 PM PST by G Larry (Its RACIST to impose slave wages on LEGAL immigrants and minorities by importing cheap ILLEGAL labor)

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