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Is pope Francis attempting to bring in gay marriage by the back door?
Kind of a long story, so bear with me for the background(https://www.ncregister.com/news/cardinals-send-dubia-to-pope-ahead-of-synod-on-synodality):
Submitting dubia is not a particularly uncommon occurrence and does not have a strong partisan(for lack of a better term) valence. The summary of these particular dubia later on in the same article is fairly accurate, but you can read them in their entirety, along with Cardinal Burke's statement on resubmitting them, here: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2023/10/full-text-of-new-dubia-sent-to-francis.html
What is unusual is resubmitting dubia after being dissatisfied with the response received, which is what happened here:
Interestingly, the pope's(in reality Cardinal Fernandez's[head of the DDF, the Vatican's doctrine branch, occupying the position that in recent pontificates has been a de facto #2 spot]) responses were leaked anyways, by the Vatican(https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255539/read-pope-francis-response-to-the-dubia-presented-to-him-by-5-cardinals). As that link demonstrates, the responses are indeed not the customary yes or no replies. I'm not quoting the whole thing, because they're lengthy word salad, but the most interesting, and controversial, part, is below, the response to the second dubia:
That's a lot of words to come full circle, but the middle part- about blessing same sex non-weddings- is what has hair on fire. If you take the position that any of those paragraphs are not meaningless argle-bargle, paragraph g about the need to ensure blessings of same sex couples doesn't become a norm would not be among them. Again from the first article:
I am inclined to believe Cardinal Fernandez here, because A) responsa ad dubium are normally approved by the pope himself, so the middle paragraphs about blessing same sex non-weddings were approved by pope Francis B) firing Cardinal Fernandez over a previous screw up and disowning his comments would be trivially easy due to his atrocious record on handling sex abuse cases, yet he was appointed personally by Pope Francis rather than as a compromise(as Ladaria, the previous occupant of the office- and the issuer of the 2021 clarification against blessing same sex unions which it is rumored played a part in Francis' decision not to appoint him to a second term) or a holdover from Benedict XVI(as was Muller, the predecessor to Ladaria) and C) breaking with precedent in this manner is so highly unusual for a cabinet-level Vatican position that there's something there, and dragging your boss under the bus is not recommended.
What would it mean if the synod on synodality(which starts wednesday, and kicked off the whole brouhaha with this particular round of dubia) does in fact create significant wiggle room for bishops to authorize same sex non-weddings? Well, back to Cardinal Muller, who has previously pointed to this as a possible red line for some kind of ill-defined drastic action(https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/cardinal-muller-warns-same-sex-blessings-are-blasphemy-as-synod-on-synodality-looms/):
And:
Cardinal Muller, for those who are unfamiliar, is powerful enough within the church oligarchy to have previously vetoed a candidate for Cardinal Fernandez's current spot(https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2022/12/cardinals-block-appointment-of-heiner.html), so him saying something like this is a very big deal, albeit poorly defined what it would actually look like.
So the obvious response here is 'God of the margins' stuff (What the church believes/does now is nothing like what it believed/did 1000 years ago, it has always moved with the times to reflect popular understanding and preferences), real politik stuff (The church's #1 job is to keep member roles and coffers high, which means giving the audience what they want), etc. I think that's all relevant but also pretty played out as a topic of discussion for anyone who was online in the last few decades.
The more interesting question I want to ask of anyone who knows anything about how church theology works - which I don't really - is whether empirical evidence ever plays a role in determining the will of God in cases like this, and when/how it does so.
Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.
Before gay marriage was legal a Christian could speculate about all kinds of consequences of allowing such unholy unions, but they didn't really happen, so... does that weigh against those people's predictions on how God feels on the matter? Is that evidence that this was mostly people misinterpreting Him, and He's not too worried about this, since otherwise we'd expect to see some type of mortal consequence?
I feel like in practice this must be how the church works... whether it's accepting the heliocentric model or admitting that it's ok for laymen to read the bible directly, religious beliefs do eventually bow to evidence and social norms. I'm just wondering if there's a principled model for how empirical evidence like that is weighed in those cases, or if it's just real politik without rationalization.
You don't think that legalizing gay marriage flowing directly into elective mastectomies for teenage girls and castration for teenage boys, in less than ten years since Obergefell, counts as punishment from God for our sins?
And out-of-wedlock births are continually setting record highs, at the same time that overall fertility is at record lows. I don't think you need a literal pillar of salt to conclude that it's not actually working well.
I'm an atheist, obviously I don't believe anything is punishment from God.
That said, trans rights, fuck the haters, etc. etc. As long as we're all just referencing the topic with slogans for now.
Anyway, I'm getting a lot of responses that are just 'bad things exist in the world, they happened after gay marriage, post hoc ergo propter hoc'.
I'll just here that 1. I like half those things or think they're being misrepresented 2. I don't see a necessary connection between gay marriage and the other things, someone has to actually draw that line and 3. I was asking for knowledge about how the Vatican does religious scholarship, not trying to get into an argument about whether bad things exist in the modern world.
I can point out the connection actually: it resides in the activist network designed to make the former happen and its ideological justification for existing which is based on gnostic individualist morality.
Such an apparatus would never be dissolved without defeat and would always eventually lead to ever greater perceived liberation of the mind from the body, and it had already allied itself with then transsexualism among other things.
Victory for gay rights leading to mastectomies was, in retrospect, entirely predictable. Even as I refused to believe it at the time.
Now if we want to argue about the possibility of a gay rights movement that doesn't lead here that's another thing entirely, but I'm unfortunately pessimist about the possibility thereof given history.
Seems to me homosexuality is best treated with the benign indifference of a minor vice or oddity. Other paths don't look like they lead to good places for any of the parties. Pride most of all.
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If God exists and that's His punishment then I can only assume He doesn't mind that much really. He has (we are told) previously flooded the earth, destroyed entire cities, cast people out of paradise, given crippling labor pains to all women for all time, incinerated people alive and entombed whole families in the earth, sent explicit plagues and death for tens of thousands, so allowing people to do perhaps unwise things to themselves is not exactly on the same level of Godly punishments we are told He previously indulged in.
It's so underwhelming as to suggest it probably isn't actually a punishment from God at all. Either because God doesn't care, or doesn't act on the mortal plane in that way anymore, or more likely because God doesn't actually exist.
I don't really see how these are of a different level of involvement. Or even of degree.
We're talking about pretty fucking metaphysical types of horrors here. I'd like you to acknowledge that, transhumanism in both this specific and the general sense is as consequential as getting thrown out of heaven. We're talking about changes to the nature of man, sex and identity here. This is no picnic.
God, properly understood, is the name for the intentional nature of reality. So it seems to me that consequences of hubris tautologically fall under the category of punishment.
I shall acknowledge no such thing, as I don't think they ARE comparable. Making changes to yourself and your own identity is something everyone should be free to do. I would in fact say that is the core aspect of being human. That whole pesky free will thing. It might turn out to be a bad decision, perhaps they will hate what they become. But that is their choice. Far from being a horror, being constrained from that free will would be the horror.
There is also a difference between a punishment and a consequence. A punishment requires intentionality on behalf of the punisher. A consequence does not. The outcome for a trans person may well be bad, but I highly doubt it is bad because God is punishing them directly. Reality has no intentionality in my view. God doesn't punish you for not looking where you are going and getting hit by a lump of metal going 60 mph. Reality does that without any such divine interventions required. So it is with transhumanism. And that is the true black pill. God is not responsible for our outcomes, only the vast uncaring universe is. There is no intention, there is no design. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
You are missing the point.
What you're saying in both of these paragraphs reduces to the same two things.
Either we accept Abrahamic metaphysical axioms and your statements are obvious contradictions (God created the universe with intention, consequences and all, therefore arguing there is no intent behind it doesn't make sense on the face of it).
Or this is a statement of rejection of such metaphysical principles and the assertion of a different metaphysic that simply does not apply at all to this discussion. You can be a nihilist all you want, it doesn't really enter into Catholicism.
And if you want to say that it does because nihilism is true then you have to prove that it is, which is something no metaphysical doctrine, including yours, can ever do. Inherently.
Now aside from that, I still think it's completely ridiculous to deny that making oneself and one's own identity isn't an important and grandiose topic and in the same breath admitting that it has large consequence. If your only argument is that it doesn't matter because nothing matters, I question both your understanding of importance as a concept and the relevance of nihilist perspectives to any discussion.
Even constraining our situation to one where the Christian God exists however my point is that His punishments are clear and direct. He doesn't give you mildly bad outcomes as a punishment. He smites your city. He floods the world. He lets you see the promised land then exiles you from it. He forces you to choose to kill 70,000 of your followers.
KMC's point was that the bad outcomes WERE God's punishment. But this is not consistent with this version of God. It could be consistent with YOUR version* of the universe's intentionality as God, but that isn't the God we were discussing. And since Jesus died for our sins, even those direct punishments ceased, with the idea that anyone can be forgiven and find God, through Jesus Christ. Trans people could be punished after death if their actions are sinful, but God's punishments are no longer during life. And even when they were, they were very direct.
*It could also be consistent with no God, a blind watchmaker style God and so on of course.
It's not true that in the Jewish and Christian traditions the consequences of sin only take the form of massive spectacles, even if we look only to the Bible.
Cain killed his brother and was cursed to wander the earth and have bad crops.
King David raped the wife of one his most loyal men and then had that man killed to keep it covered up. His punishment was that the child produced by that rape would die.
Abraham violated his marriage by laying with Hagar, and the consequence was strife between Hagar and Sarah that eventually led to Abraham being separated from his and Hagar's son.
Jonah was reticent to convey God's prophecy and was punished by a storm at sea and a short stay in a whale.
Judas Iscariot betrayed God and committed suicide.
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Setting aside for a moment the mechanics of punishment and that particular theological argument, surely we must agree that most Christians in the sense we mean here (and Catholics in particular) do, in fact, believe in divine intervention and miracles to this day.
As for punishment, quoting official catholic catechism should help us clarify things here:
So no, I'm afraid the nature of sin still makes the punishment we're talking about extant in this life, Christ's forgiveness doesn't remand all judgement to one's death.
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