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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.
It seems that you're arguing against the Pat Robertsons of the world who say things like Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for homosexuality.
Does anyone on the Motte actually believe things like that? No, I don't think so.
A more common Motte argument is that gay marriage is part of a word view that has led to many negative changes including declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness including, especially, the trans epidemic.
Can we have societal acceptance of gays without all the other stuff? Maybe. I don't know. It's never been tried before. But we don't need any belief in the supernatural to see that gay marriage is deeply knit into other, mostly negative, societal changes.
All of these problems exist, and in fact are even worse, in countries like South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.
This seems a case of categories being too vague to properly describe what is happening. It seems very weird to characterize what is happening in Japan and the US under the same term when they're opposite ends of the spectrum described by Durkheim with Japan and fatalism on one side and the US and anomie on the other.
Japanese alienation expresses itself with very rigid social institutions with no way to chose one's path in life which crushes individual will. American alienation looks more like loose to nonexistent social institutions that provide no life path at all which renders individual will meaningless.
These are both bad and have bad consequences, but they are very much not the same phenomenon.
"Social alienation" is harder to pin down and define, but crashing fertility and growing irreligiosity are a lot more clear-cut. But in any case, the Japanese "loneliness epidemic" seems comparable to the similar decline in community in the west.
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