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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Pope Francis has announced that priests are now allowed to bless same sex couples as long as it is not done in a way that implies that it's a ceremony or equivalent to a marriage. I haven't read the full document and the Vatican press release is confusing (like a lot of what this Pope does) but it seems to be trying to thread the needle of blessing gay couples but not their "union".

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/fiducia-supplicans-doctrine-faith-blessing-irregular-couples.html

When two people request a blessing, even if their situation as a couple is “irregular,” it will be possible for the ordained minister to consent. However, this gesture of pastoral closeness must avoid any elements that remotely resemble a marriage rite.

Of course that distinction is subtle and the mainstream media mostly appears to be either misunderstanding it or intentionally misrepresenting it as allowing the blessing of the union itself. ABC went with the headline:

Pope says priests can bless same-sex unions

While he inserted a lot of caveats so that people will not interpret this as accepting gay couples and that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, my prediction is that lay people will just walk away with the headline that the Church has got with the times and is finally ok with gay marriage. A lot of the more liberal clergy will probably spread that view as well, even if they use language that could kind of technically be considered orthodox if you squint.

It reminds me of what CS Lewis wrote about how in each age we warn people the most about the errors they are least likely to commit. So in a time when most Catholics are already essentially apostates the Pope is doing his best to guard against zealotry and intolerance. It's hard for me to believe that this will lead to anything good for the Church. The future is clearly in the more conservative faction with large, churchgoing families. A move like this will discourage them but do nothing to bring in more liberals who will applaud from a distance but aren't going to start attending Mass.

At this point arguing Catholic theology feels like arguing Star Wars lore. It's fake. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't make sense. It was always fake, but now it's super doubleplus ultra fake. If you try to apply logic to it you will end up running in circles.

It was always fake, but now it's super doubleplus ultra fake.

Thank you Jehan Cauvin for your opinion, but I'm sticking with The Dumb Ox.

Yes, elements like the trinity in particular are some of the biggest historical examples of "point deer, make horse" style shit tests for making dissidents reveal themselves and getting others to show a token of submission to an authority over their own sense of reason.

Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that? The Trinity is a theological doctrine that doesn't directly contradict any experience of how the world works, and if it sounds strange or unintuitive, frankly it seems even more unintuitive that an infinite, all-powerful deity would have an innermost being exactly like or easily comprehensible to humans.

If I wanted to point to something empirically absurd, I would have thought the obvious candidates are things like transubstantiation or even the virgin birth - something that appears to plainly go against how we think the world works.

(Of course, it is perhaps relevant to say here that transubstantiation or the virgin birth didn't go against how ancient people thought the world worked, so they can't have been demanding believe in an absurdity as proof of loyalty. If they seem absurd now, that is surely more due to a changing weltanschaung around them. I doubt that the church at any point actually demanded belief in something that seems absurd as a loyalty test to weed out dissidents; that sounds to me like a post hoc rationalist attempt to make sense of something that probably just made sense to people at the time on its own terms.)

Of course, it is perhaps relevant to say here that transubstantiation or the virgin birth didn't go against how ancient people thought the world worked, so they can't have been demanding believe in an absurdity as proof of loyalty.

Errrr - I think you're skipping that part in the Gospel where, when Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant, he is going to quietly divorce her (so she won't be publicly stoned for adultery) until he gets the visit from the angel to say "no, she didn't sleep around on you, this is a miracle":

Matthew 1: 18-25

18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel”

(which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

I didn't say that the virgin birth would have been seen as obviously true, in a way that admits of no possible doubt.

I said that it's not obviously absurd - not in the way that it might seem to someone with a contemporary scientific worldview. Miraculous births are conceivable (pun unintended) in an ancient Near Eastern worldview. Joseph doesn't object to the angel that what he's telling him is impossible, after all. He is surprised but accepts that this is something that God could in principle do.

Why would you say that someone with a contemporary scientific worldview would find it harder to believe in the virgin birth than Joseph did? What have we learned since then that makes it harder to believe? Surely knowing the mechanics of fertilization and early human development doesn't change the fact that people in those days knew just as well as we do that you don't get pregnant without a father involved.

In both cases believing in a miraculous birth is believing in supernatural intervention, violating the natural order. It should be just as easy or difficult to believe in any age. What have we learned since then that would change that?

I think the idea is that people in those times, especially pagans, saw supernatural forces as much more involved than people today do. The sun is Helios himself driving across the horizon, plagues or earthquakes were sent by God, the coin you put in a grave will be used to pay Charon etc. Given that context, a virgin birth doesn't violate nearly as many assumptions about how the world (usually) works as it would even for a typical contemporary theistic account of reality.

All of this is conflating two different meanings of "miracle".

In ancient world, there was distinction between 1/"paradoxon" - any strange and inexplicable thing or event and 2/"semeion" - sign or portent, that does not have to be extraordinary by itself, sent by god(s) or fate.

The difference is that semeion means something and the meaning is clear.

For example:

Lightning falling from a cloudless sky - paradoxon. It could be bad omen or warning, or Zeus could be just bored.

Ligtning falling during thunderstorm and exactly hitting notorious sinner's house - semeion. The meaning is clear: Repent and do not sin anymore.

Supernatural forces being more involved than today might make it easier to believe that a miracle had occurred: it wouldn't change the fact that you would understand it to be a miracle. It's not like Joseph thought to himself "Well, I guess sometimes women can have babies without having sex with anyone." He knew just the same as we do that that sort of thing doesn't happen, and that if it does happen it would be a miracle. A virgin birth violates as many assumptions about how the world works back then as it does today: in both cases the only explanation for such a thing occurring would be a miracle (that is to say, a violation of the natural order by an outside force).

Both Roman pagan Celsus and passages in the Jewish Talmud also claimed that Jesus was actually the product of adultery between Jesus' mother and a Roman soldier named Pantera. There was definitely skepticism by others about the virgin birth business.

Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that?

Maybe you don't really understand the doctine of the trinity? It's something that you can't logically explain or understand but you have to believe. I'm not even sure what it could mean to believe something you don't understand.

Any attempts at making it make logical sense have been declared heretical, for example:

  • Jesus was a human but operated like a remote controlled meat robot for God: adoptionism
  • Jesus didn't exist before he was born in human form: socinianism
  • Jesus never actually had a human body, he was something different throughout: docinianism
  • Jesus is actually a separate thing from God: arianism
  • Father, Son and Spirit are three different forms taken by God (kinda like water can be liquid, ice or vapor): modalism

I agree with you, it seems like even accepting the basic principles of Abrahamic religion regarding the power of God, Jesus’ existence as a human defies all explanation and any attempt to describe it in terms that make sense to humans are heretical. The point is that it doesn’t make sense, it’s not even like any of the above would make God less omniscient or omnipotent or the rest of it all, it’s almost like a game where you’re banned from rephrasing the question itself. It’s effectively prohibited to TRY to make sense of it.

I'd like to hope that I understand it, considering that I have multiple degrees in theology and have done research projects applying a Trinitarian lens to a range of issues...

There's a sense in which I would say that I don't understand the Trinity. Like Augustine and the seashell, nobody fully understands it. But I hope that I understand it approximately as well as a human being can.

The third one is docetism, incidentally.

And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?

Sure. The idea that nobody would fully understand the nature of God is not a particularly shocking one - certainly both Jews and Muslims will happily accept that much. You might as well point out that no physicist fully understands their own field of study. We gain more knowledge, we learn, but we never reach total comprehension. That's quite all right?

Incidentally, I mentioned the virgin birth. The perpetual virginity is a different doctrine. As FarNearEverywhere notes, even the Reformers, who were as strongly committed to the virgin birth as anyone, had doubts about the perpetual virginity of Mary, particularly in light of Jesus apparently having siblings.

And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?

Yeah, because even the Reformers had a falling out about the perpetual virginity of Mary; Luther had no problem with it, but he was still in mindset a Catholic. As denominations got more Protestant over time, and with the fears of Mariolatry, they denied her virginity.

Of course, then down the line, this leads to denying the Virgin Birth altogether, because hey how can a modern person of the scientific era believe in pregnancy without sex, and then it's not a big step to "Jesus was Just This Guy, You Know?", but that's their problem, not ours or the Orthodox

See the Athakist to the Theotokos:

Priest: Eloquent rhetors we see mute as fish before you O Theotokos. For they are at a loss to explain how you had the power to give birth and yet remained a virgin. But we the faithful marveling at the mystery cry out with faith:

Rejoice, vessel of God's wisdom;
Rejoice, storehouse of God's providence.
Rejoice, revealer of philosophers as fools;
Rejoice, exposer of the technologists as irrational.
Rejoice, for the fierce debaters are made foolish;
Rejoice, for the creators of the myths have wilted.
Rejoice, breaker of the webs of the Athenians' logic;
Rejoice, filler of the nets of the fishermen.
Rejoice, drawer of many from the abyss of ignorance;
Rejoice, enlightener of many with knowledge.
Rejoice, ship for those wishing salvation;
Rejoice, harbor for life's navigators.
Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.

Transubstantiation and virgin birth are definitely way up there. Trinitarianism was most prominent in mind when composing the post due to having recently read Jewish, Islamic and Japanese Buddhist/Shintoist polemics contra Christianity that glossed over transubstantiation and virgin birth* but shared in common criticism of the trinity as nonsensical and in conflict with monotheism, by people centuries ago that otherwise accepted magic and deities.

It does not have to have been consciously devised as a "point deer, make horse" to have played that role in effects.

*Except for a Japanese author, IIRC Fabian Fukan, who brought it up to argue that Catholicism taught followers bad morals by celebrating Mary's celibacy rather than criticizing that as neglecting her husband.

As an aside, there is a common misunderstanding in the Islamic world that the Christian Trinity refers to God, Jesus, and Mary, not the Holy Spirit.

5:116 And ˹on Judgment Day˺ Allah will say, “O Jesus, son of Mary! Did you ever ask the people to worship you and your mother as gods besides Allah?” He will answer, “Glory be to You! How could I ever say what I had no right to say? If I had said such a thing, you would have certainly known it. You know what is ˹hidden˺ within me, but I do not know what is within You. Indeed, You ˹alone˺ are the Knower of all unseen.

5:117 I never told them anything except what You ordered me to say: “Worship Allah—my Lord and your Lord!” And I was witness over them as long as I remained among them. But when You took me, You were the Witness over them—and You are a Witness over all things.

5:118 If You punish them, they belong to You after all. But if You forgive them, You are surely the Almighty, All-Wise.”

I think this is an easy mistake to make given these verses. Serious scholars in Islam are ofc aware this is not the case. There is another misunderstanding that the Holy Spirit is the Angel Gabriel (he is also the entity that spoke the Koran to Mohammad, humans, even prophets, being unable to survive a direct communication from God).

The Koran is a surprisingly short book, about 7% the length of the Bible and shorter than many popular novels. It also repeats itself a great deal. More people should read it imo. It makes the behavior of extremist* Muslims much less confusing. The hardest part is the terrible formatting in most English translations. Gabriel switches from directly quoting Allah to Mohammad to speaking seemingly on his own without any clear indicators that the switch had occurred. Good translations will use various means to make this more clear.

*If someone believes the Koran is literally true, there is nothing extreme about groups like ISIS at all. They are following a a fairly literal interpretation of the Koran (in the tradition of the Hanbali fiqh Salafist movement, which is also the dominant tradition in Saudi Arabia)

point deer, make horse

Total tangent, but I looked this up and it is very confusing. The story seems straight forward and simple enough, and everyone here seems to be using it in the same way, which is directly referential to the origin story. Blatant lies as loyalty test, might be my definition for the idiom. However, the first couple results when I googled it, all explained the idiom as some variation of, "to lie to manipulate people because you are evil", what is going on here? For some reason I am very upset by this. Are the google translations correct, and the idiom is really that watered down/pointless, or is this just several different people all using the same shitty translation that lacks the nuanced understanding of a native speaker?

There's a lot of background to Zhao Gao (see the Chinese-language equivalent in China, in similar ways to Nobunaga in Japan, Napoleon in Europe, or Benedict Arnold in the United States. Whether because of their coincidental presence at a significant turning point in history or because of their outsized personal impact, there's a lot of connotations to any story including them that are not obvious from the immediate reading.

This is especially complicated in Zhao Gao's case because of the more clearly mixed results of the Qin Dynasty as a whole: the same group that made the Great Wall of China and formalized China as a country (Chin derives from romantization of Qin!) was also a corrupt tyrant, and the very policies that drove the Qin's success also lead to its collapse. Zhao Gao is sometimes upheld as the embodiment of that duality, as a remnant of a past dynasty able to exploiting the strict doctrines of the current one and to drive the first emperor's son to suicide as 'his fathers' (forged) command.

The strict google translation is correct, and useful on its own, but it's often used and useful where the loyalty test isn't simultaneously linked to shittest-giver trying to overthrow a country, or where whatever loyalty test component is far subordinate to the evil machinations.

Well, I suppose those groups wouldn't have made that polemic because the virgin birth or transubstantiation aren't particularly inconceivable to any of them? Judaism and Islam shared enough Aristotelian metaphysics to make transubstantiation comprehensible, even if false - and of course, virgin births are quite comprehensible. Islam even expressly affirms the virgin birth. The issue with Judaism and Islam isn't so much to do with what's obvious or not as with those traditions' strong convictions regarding the unity of God.

I guess my question is whether there's any sort of "calling a deer a horse" effect here at all? Atheists today have a worldview that makes some of these beliefs seem ridiculous on their face, so it would be difficult for them to affirm them.

However, the people who made these claims historically, and who argued against them polemically, would not have found them implausible in that way. You note a Japanese author whose criticism of the virgin birth isn't that such a thing is impossible, but rather that its moral implications are questionable. Or if we take the Islamic criticism of Christianity - as I understand it, the central Islamic critique is not that the Trinity is obviously ridiculous, but rather that the Trinity is unsuitable to the dignity of God. It's not that the Trinity is absurd, but that it's insulting.

Take this:

Yes, elements like the trinity in particular are some of the biggest historical examples of "point deer, make horse" style shit tests for making dissidents reveal themselves and getting others to show a token of submission to an authority over their own sense of reason.

I am not sure this ever happened?

Christians certainly compelled people to confess belief in the Trinity - that's not in question. But I question that this was ever something plainly false, with the effect (even if unintended) of revealing intellectual dissidents? Confessions of faith like that are frequently tests to try to discover heretics or dissidents; I just doubt that the logic was ever to get someone to confess something against their own reason. Trinitarians believe that the Trinity is fully in accordance with reason; and non-Trinitarians generally had their own, substantive reasons for rejecting it.

Of course that distinction is subtle and the mainstream media mostly appears to be either misunderstanding it or intentionally misrepresenting it as allowing the blessing of the union itself.

My question would be, will significant numbers of liberal priests also 'misinterpret' it that way and actually bless those unions? And could the Pope have predicted they would do that?

(legitimate questions, I don't know much about it)

Assuming yes to both questions, it's still technically inaccurate to say 'The Pope is allowing priests to bless unions', but only very technically. If that was the predictable-to-him outcome of his actions, that's kind of what he did, regardless of what he said.

So in a time when most Catholics are already essentially apostates the Pope is doing his best to guard against zealotry and intolerance. It's hard for me to believe that this will lead to anything good for the Church. The future is clearly in the more conservative faction with large, churchgoing families. A move like this will discourage them but do nothing to bring in more liberals who will applaud from a distance but aren't going to start attending Mass.

Again, not my area, but this feels wrong to me. I've heard lots of stories from people who left the church because it wasn't tolerant enough for them, not because of some more fundamental theological dispute. The most socially progressive people in the world fall into witchcraft, astrology, tarot, crystals, psychics, etc; I think there's actually a pretty huge demographic of people who are hungry for a spiritual organization in their life, and just need it to clash with their worldly values less.

At least, in blue states in the US. I certainly have a biased sample that I'm drawing from here.

My question would be, will significant numbers of liberal priests also 'misinterpret' it that way and actually bless those unions? And could the Pope have predicted they would do that?

I'm not an expert but the almost universal consensus on /r/Catholicism seems be yes to the first question. The second one is more mixed depending with some saying that's his intended outcome and others saying that would be the fault of the people who are interpreting it too broadly.

I agree that there are people looking for spiritualism but just as a fun hobby, they wouldn't be interested in anything that requires them to change their behavior as drastically as Christianity would. I think people pushing for gay rights in Catholicism are mostly interested in gay rights side of things than they are in the church side.

I agree that there are people looking for spiritualism but just as a fun hobby, they wouldn't be interested in anything that requires them to change their behavior as drastically as Christianity would.

I dunno, I definitely know a lot of pagans and new-agers who spend more time and money on that than the average Christian (not a highly devout one), but agreed that's a much smaller demographic at that point.

If, charitably and by the literal wording, the point of the Pope's document is to say 'you can bless the individual(s) in a same-sex union, but you are not blessing the union itself', this isn't really anything new and is at best just a clarification on existing practices.

But if this is supposedly not a new postition then why even make such a clarification, when in practice everyone knows it is going to lead to more confusion and misrepresentation. Unless the point is to deliberately introduce ambiguity under the guise of clarification, of course.

Regardless, if living in a same-sex union is a mortal sin, then priests shouldn't be blessing individuals actively, knowingly, publicly and persistently living in mortal sin anyway.

The thing is, Pope Francis is a quite skilled user of the media - compare "I will not say one word on this", knowing how the media would take that.

The pope is limited in his ability to actually contradict previous teaching. Direct contradiction provokes responses and creates crises. But he can carefully speak in ways that are certain to be misinterpreted, and in doing so communicate a message that he cannot publicly endorse. He can create his own bailey, and trust that others will occupy it for him. As Ross Douthat says, the misleading headlines are the point.

Is that what he is doing? I don't know - I have no evidence of that. But Pope Francis' reform style in general has been about putting out feelers and provoking misinterpretation (e.g. "Who am I to judge?", that Amoris Laetitia footnote, etc.) without committing himself to anything definite, while also, as all popes do, generally promoting ideological allies while marginalising ideological opponents (e.g. Joseph Strickland and Raymond Burke both got hit recently).

Moving the Catholic Church is a very difficult and slow process. I'd guess that Pope Francis definitely wants to move it in the direction of LGBT acceptance, even if for him that might take the form of welcoming people, not issuing any condemnations whatsoever, and effectively neutering the traditional doctrine, even if sacramental marriage remains technically untouched.

Quick reminder to everyone that Islam exists and does not suffer from this ... problem ...

  • -13

How much of that is due to the fundamentals of either religion as opposed to the whims of cultural change? Today mainstream Islam is conservative and fundamentalist while Catholicism is the milquetoast liberal religion, but historically the roles were actually reversed!

Muslims were famously more tolerant of Jews in Al-Andalus than the catholic Spanish, and while Justinian the Great criminalised all homosexuality from the 6th century onwards, classical Islamic cultures had an approach very close to Greco-Roman mores where men were expected to be attracted to both girls and pubescent boys. Numerous caliphs, emirs and sultans (including Mehmed the Conqueror) were known to have male lovers, and these are kinds of societies that produced many instances of effeminate, sexually available male dancers from the Ottoman köçek to the Egyptian khawal. Literary works in the Muslim world were quite shameless in the amount of homoeroticism compared to anything in the West.

But as other commenters have noted, if you’re a Catholic and start disagreeing with the direction of the church, converting to Islam makes little logical sense. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to convert to any of the thousands of other Christian branches? Or even just start following the former Bishop Strickland and say Pope Francis is the anti-Christ and a usurper of the papal position.

classical Islamic cultures had an approach very close to Greco-Roman mores where men were expected to be attracted to both girls and pubescent boys. Numerous caliphs, emirs and sultans (including Mehmed the Conqueror) were known to have male lovers, and these are kinds of societies that produced many instances of effeminate, sexually available male dancers from the Ottoman köçek to the Egyptian khawal. Literary works in the Muslim world were quite shameless in the amount of homoeroticism compared to anything in the West.

Why the past tense? It was a live issue for the US in Afghanistan.

Or even just start following the former Bishop Strickland and say Pope Francis is the anti-Christ and a usurper of the papal position.

Strickland is still a bishop, although he currently is an unemployed bishop, and he’s not a sedevacantist- he believes pope Francis is the pope.

You might be thinking of archbishop Vigano, who is a former Vatican bigwig most know for claiming the most recent conclave involved some kind of usurpation.

I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that this is a foolish reason to convert from Christianity to Islam.

Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten not created, coeternal with the Father, who died for the forgiveness of sins and will return in glory to bring life to the world?

If the answer is yes, then you stay within Christianity, and no amount of church heresy about sexuality can change that.

Likewise: is Muhammad the final prophet of God, and the Qur'an the true word of God, directly dictated to the prophet by the archangel Gabriel?

If the answer is yes, then you should become a Muslim, no matter how good or bad Christians or Muslims might be on the subject of sexuality.

Christianity and Islam both contain core, substantive claims that go far beyond sexuality. If the churches are all wrong on sexuality, but nonetheless Jesus is Lord, then you stay a Christian and you continue to practice that faith, alone if need be, or even fight to repair the church. If Islam is all wrong on sexuality or anything else, but there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet, then you should be a Muslim, and make your daily prayers, and stay faithful to what God has said, and if the ummah has gone astray, try to repair it as best you can.

But the core claims matter.

Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten not created, coeternal with the Father, who died for the forgiveness of sins and will return in glory to bring life to the world?

If the answer is yes, then you stay within Christianity, and no amount of church heresy about sexuality can change that.

Likewise: is Muhammad the final prophet of God, and the Qur'an the true word of God, directly dictated to the prophet by the archangel Gabriel?

If the answer is yes, then you should become a Muslim, no matter how good or bad Christians or Muslims might be on the subject of sexuality.

......

But the core claims matter.

This perspective always strikes as odd from an outsider's perspective. To me, the divinity of Jesus or the prophethood of Muhammad are clearly the legitimization methods, not the essence, of their respective religions. "You should believe X because Y." Imagine an alternate universe where Muhammad taught Catholic doctrine on grace and God's kingdom, preached radical forgiveness and against material wealth; while Jesus related the Quran to his disciples, who subsequently waged Ghazwah against polytheists to protect the faith and bring fellow monotheists under a protection/patronage system. I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.

Of course, the moment one becomes cynical enough to meta-reason past these legitimization claims and choose a belief set on its own merits, one has ceased to be religious in any appreciable way, and might as well just make up one's own beliefs.

I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.

And if a pig was a dog he'd be a dog?

I don't see how this pertains to if someone should convert to Islam from Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.

I'm making more of a normative claim here than a descriptive one, though? I'm certainly making a claim about how people should believe, but I think that's a reasonable thing to do in any discussion of changing belief systems? If someone is considering converting to a different religion, it seems reasonable to me to ask the question of on what basis they should do that.

In practice conversions often have to do with everything from just connecting with a community to finding the aesthetics of a tradition appealing, and I'm not going to deny the attractive force of such things - but at some point I'd argue that any sincere person ought to ask the question, "Is this true?"

And I'm happy to claim that the answer to that question should matter.

Having a Pope?

One upside to brutally murdering blasphemers is that it will tend to result in fewer blasphemers, I suppose.

I fear that if we start brutally murdering blasphemers, it'll be a slippery slope to brutally murdering other types of people.

(jk)

Well, yes, but it's not all doom and gloom: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tnYxxsIO8uc&t=59

Well it's nice and all, but it suffers from other problems.

Like sure the Catholics have had to deal with some really shitty Popes over the years, but at least they still have a way of reforming their religion without waiting for someone to conquer half the world.

You might be interested in Sufism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism ; It's the tolerant and mystic branch of Islam.

Islam as a religion is not like Catholicism where you have the pope leading it and you have to accept him as the spiritual guide for everyone, instead it's more like Protestantism with its myraid denominations, do you know your difference from your Hanafi and your Hanbali? Your Ismaili from your Twelvers? And the first comparison here is just between Sunni schools of jurispudence (forget theology, you have many different schools of that too, just contained within Sunni Islam).

Just to continue the point from above - Sufism is fantastic. I think it's maybe a bit misleading to stereotype it as the tolerant branch of Islam, though? Sufism is also more like a family. What unites Sufis is the belief that the Qur'an (and often hadith as well) cannot be understood only on a surface reading, but rather true knowledge of God's nature depends on insights that can be obtained from mystical practice and from the tutelage of more experienced spiritual guides. Hidden layers of meaning can be uncovered from this practice and explored.

The problem is that those experienced spiritual guides can vary a lot - Sufism contains many different tariqat, or schools or paths. Some tariqat are rigorously orthodox and conservative. Some are not. Some tariqat, from a non-Sufi perspective, look like outright shirk, and even the more orthodox ones often look a bit 'weird' to non-Sufi eyes.

One result is that Sufis vary a lot, Sufi-sympathetic people in the West often pick only the most congenial-looking paths, and that in practice Sufi communities can be weird, heretical, or even just horrible and unpleasant in an ordinary human way.

This isn't meant to discourage people from looking into Sufism! It's great! But it's helpful, I think, to be aware that it's as broad as looking into 'Christian mysticism' as a general heading. I'm sure we all understand that the category 'Christian mystics' is broad and contains a lot of good and a lot of bad and you have to use your judgement. Sufism is the same.

What about the 'throw money around' tactic? Saudi Arabia did a good job in reforming Islam by funding Wahhabism around the world. They reformed it in a direction we consider undesirable but they did reform it. There wasn't nearly so much Sunni fundamentalism 40-50 years ago. They spent around $100 billion setting up schools, distributing qurans, getting academics into positions of prominence. Good ROI considering we then spent trillions trying and failing to combat fundamentalist Islam.

Somewhere in here is a funny, but not terribly serious joke about the Reformation and the British Empire controlling half the world, but I'm not quite sure how it goes.

As a disinterested atheist, it seems pretty clear to me that the Vatican is just trying to slow-walk gay marriage. I'm sure they'll do it bit by bit, with just enough continuation between each change to avoid getting called out too heavily, but the end result will be rainbow flags in St Peter's Basilica.

I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church? Would they just be another protestant denomination at that point? Can they appoint their own Pope? Or get one of their own elected to the Papacy?

This Reddit thread is hilarious. A handful of posters acknowledging what this is, another handful criticising the Vatican for ambiguity (as if this wasn't part of the plan) and another group saying that it doesn't technically involve blessing gay unions so there's nothing to see here.

I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church?

My prediction would be that Sedevacantism and similar movements continue to grow. As far as what the long term future of such movements is, I don't know.

My impression is that Eastern Orthodoxy is becoming a home for such people more than sedevacantism. Sedes are rare but noisy, similar to the dissident right.

The closest numbers I've seen is that the SSPX has about ten times as many worshippers on an average Sunday as every sedevacantist group combined- but in the anglosphere the numbers might be close to even between the two, and the SSPX is a decent plurality but still a minority of global traditionalists.

Roughly speaking, there's three big homegrown groups of traditional Catholics(what IRL tradcaths call themselves)- France, the USA, and Brazil, in roughly that order of size. Germany, the Phillippines, Ukraine, Mexico, etc have smaller groups that still exist and can periodically be notable, but those, and their suburbs like Canada and Belgium, are the big three. Sedevacantists are mostly a US thing, and the IRL ones are significantly likelier to tend towards the holocaust denying geocentrist end of traditional Catholicism than your regular SSPX or FSSP attendee(and there is a lot of overlap between the two). That trads are growing both demographically and from conversion doesn't mean that the sedevacantists are specifically benefiting much, they're probably a single digit percentage which doesn't cross pollinate with other traditional groups and some percentage of which are enclosed cults anyways.

In terms of what actual IRL tradcaths- the mainstream ones, that is- are going to do, well, there's a widely repeated conspiracy theory in our circles that the long term goal is to push every tradcath priest into the SSPX(which is not in schism right now but may or may not have been in the 90's) and then excommunicate everyone eventually. I don't personally think the current admin in the Vatican thinks that far ahead, but stuff like this is likely to confirm that theory and convince the IRL trads to dig in harder where we're at, on the theory that orthodox conservative but not particularly traditionalist leaders will throw their weight behind us when the culture wars, for lack of a better term, are hotter. There's some evidence behind this theory; certainly if stuff like this results in a schism, that schism will be lead by Robert Cardinal Muller, who had not been friendly to the Latin mass before Amoris Laetitia but certainly is now(and the very popular but less formally influential bishop Barron is also much more sympathetic to the Latin mass than he had been). Trads on our own getting pushed out will just lead to a bigger SSPX.

By the way, while traditional Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy compete for converts, there's not very much in the way of traditional Catholics leaving to become Orthodox; traditional Catholics mostly view Eastern Orthodoxy as having surrendered to the world in the way the current Vatican administration would like to do but hasn't been able to... over a thousand years ago. My impression is that former trads who leave either become more liberal(sometimes nonpracticing but usually not formally apostate) Catholics or join some kind of confessional Lutheran group with extremely conservative social views.

the SSPX(which is not in schism right now but may or may not have been in the 90's)

The SSPX was definitely in schism in the 90s and is probably still in schism right now. Per canon 751, "schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him." "Recognize and resist" is not submission.

It's messy.

traditional Catholics mostly view Eastern Orthodoxy as having surrendered to the world in the way the current Vatican administration would like to do but hasn't been able to... over a thousand years ago.

How is that? It seems to me that's what the Orthodox think about Catholics.

It goes both ways, man, and core membership tends not to switch back and forth much. Traditional Catholics in particular tend to see Humanae vitae as the clearest evidence of the church not having defected and look at Eastern Orthodox attitudes towards birth control as the opposite of that.

Presumably the stance on contraception is not a thousand years old.

Catholic doctrines on contraception can be traced back to ~100 AD. Whether or not Roman contraceptives worked(and iirc, it’s not a fringe position among academics to think they did), early church officials seemed to believe they did and needed condemnation.

More comments

The Catholic Church has always maintained:

  • same-sex marriage is an impossibility
  • same-sex sexual/erotic relationships are disordered, immoral and sinful.
  • Priests should not bless sin
  • Priests have wide discretion to give blessings to anyone and everyone, for mundane things and important things, even and especially to sinners. Eg you have the priest bless your pet or your hunting rifle or many other things. It would be possible to ask for a blessing in a business partnership or a promise of livelong brotherly love and friendship.
  • Priests should not give blessings to same-sex unions, or give any blessings to same sex couples in a way that would be scandalous (ie make it seem it is giving approval to sinful behavior) or that would create confusion with a sacramental marriage or confusion about church doctrine.

The recently released document reiterates all those points. The ABC headline is simply false

However, the thing that the liberals in the church are excited about is the changing emphasis in terms of pastoral care:

Paragraph 12. One must also avoid the risk of reducing the meaning of blessings to this point of view alone, for it would lead us to expect the same moral conditions for a simple blessing that are called for in the reception of the sacraments. Such a risk requires that we broaden this perspective further. Indeed, there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites, which, under the claim of control, could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.

Paragraph 13. Precisely in this regard, Pope Francis urged us not to “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and to avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.”[11] Let us then respond to the Holy Father’s proposal by developing a broader understanding of blessings.

So previously maybe two gay men walk into the church and ask the priest, "Can you bless our dedication of life-long love to each other?" The priest is wary and says, "Wait ... love 'amore' or love 'caritas'?" So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.

After this document, a liberal priest now has a winking approval from a Vatican that he is allowed to play ignorant and not "subject the couple to moral prerequisites" and avoid "being a judge who rejects." So instead of asking about the nature of their relationship or telling them to go and sin no more, he may give a blessing like, "may all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit."

So it is effectively "don't ask, don't tell" with respect to blessings? I hope it works out better than it did for the military.

So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.

Yeah, I think the idea here is that "well if the two of them are in a committed relationship and not whoring around promiscuously, that's better than nothing, so don't break the bruised reed", something like Benedict's comments on using condoms, but it's not the ideal. And of course the liberals are going to run full-tilt with this on "yes bless your marriage yes sure it's fine to fuck around".

"well if the two of them are in a committed relationship and not whoring around promiscuously, that's better than nothing, so don't break the bruised reed"

I can kinda see this for heterosexual relationships since they can always be made an honest woman/man eventually.

Someone who decided to get gay married is actively making a commitment to an institution that has never been accepted by the church. It's not just sin but defiance, defiance in service of a set of cultural memes (for one: that a person's "gay" identity trumps their religious identity, or the prescriptions it implies) that are hostile to a bunch of traditional religious views.

"Not ideal" seems like an understatement.

I can kinda see this for heterosexual relationships since they can always be made an honest woman/man eventually.

Not necessarily; the Catholic Church does not recognize marriages where either party has been divorced.

“Catholic Church”, “marriages”, and “divorced”, should be in scare quotes for that sentence to be even remotely accurate to ground-level reality.

As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"? It's not a high sacrament: blessing meals is ubiquitous, and I've never seen a priest refuse to provide a blessing in lieu of communion to non-members. I know there are limitations on selling blessed objects.

I wouldn't be surprised at priests blessing weapons of war (although most of the examples that come to mind might be orthodox or protestant, there is a Catholic concept of Just War), but I can imagine a refusal to bless, say, objects of a prurient nature. Is this generally up to discretion or is there a general bright line rule I'm not familiar with (or more likely, some combination)?

As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"?

Almost nothing, race horses get routinely blessed.

I'm at least 30% that the NFL team in New Orleans was named The Saints so that local priests wouldn't raise eyebrows when blessing "The Saints" (the football team).

I can imagine a refusal to bless, say, objects of a prurient nature.

Vorpal Dildo +3 is perhaps not on the table?

Never was. Bladed weapons only iirc.

No holy watersports for me!

There is a Catholic photo that shows up with some regularity but it's a Priest blessing rifles for hunting. There is the old De Benedictione Armorum from a Roman Pontifical of Benedict XIV and Leo XIII which some folks have grown attached to but it is as much about blessing the person who will wear them and use them for defense of themselves, others and the Church as the weapon itself.

About 10 years ago, I found a recording on the internet of a Catholic military chaplain blessing the little boy atomic bomb before it went off to destroy Hiroshima. Stupid me forgot to save the reference, and I've been searching for it in vain ever since :(

The Nagasaki recording would have greater ironical value, for the Fat Man destroyed the largest Christian structure in the Asia-Pacific region. The Catholic priest (George Zabelka) who blessed the bomb, later recanted.

There’s even a conspiracy by some ultra right-wing Catholics that the US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki as a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Catholic Church in Japan. Apparently it (and maybe Hiroshima too? I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to look it up) had one of the largest Catholic populations in Japan.

A blessing is a sacramental, which means it imparts grace on the basis of ‘your-belief-makes-it-real’ not on an inherent ontological change. Yes, there are fancy Latin theology terms for those things, but I’m going with an easy to understand summary. There are blessings for weapons, certainly(I’ve witnessed them), and for animals, items of clothing, those about to enter religious life, etc, etc.

But Catholic doctrine holds that it is impossible to gain in grace while in mortal sin, and also that sodomy and everything leading up to it is a mortal sin that one remains in until confession after breaking up the relationship it took place in. So these blessings would be presumptively invalid.

I read the entire document. Some things to note that cardinal Fernandez inserted into the document:

  1. The blessings of same sex couples and of irregular unions(that is, divorced and remarried) are treated identically. Irregular unions are a live issue subject to massive prior controversy under pope Francis, and there are actual respectable theologians who believe his prior approach constitutes heresy.

  2. These blessings are not allowed to be conducted with a set ritual.

  3. The main restriction on these blessings is that they are not to be confused with a wedding ceremony in any way; the document bars those seeking them from wearing clothes associated with marriage and parishes from hosting receptions to celebrate.

Edit: the US bishops conference has released a statement(https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/statement-usccb-vaticans-document-addressing-pastoral-blessings?utm_term=).

I'm not sure of the proper terms, but has this been couched as inerrant, permanent doctrine, or is this one of those things that under Catholic doctrine, a future pope could walk back?

What is the Catholic doctrine for the hypothetical case of a pope declaring something clearly heretical as binding doctrine?

has this been couched as inerrant, permanent doctrine, or is this one of those things that under Catholic doctrine, a future pope could walk back?

It's a pastoral decision, so it's primarily about discipline and it definitely can be walked back. Francis has not said "yeah, gay marriage" so it's not a change in doctrine. The problem is everyone who is now going to run with "the Pope is okay with gay marriage".

This is why Benedict was my pope and Francis is not, but he's still the guy in the pallium, so 🤷‍♀️

The term for invoking papal infallibility to establish doctrine is called speaking ex cathedra. Francis has never spoken ex cathedra, and in fact it's very rare for Popes to do so.

See pope Formosus and the council of Constance(separate incidents). And pope honorius I.

The pope is an 87 year old man with cancer and at least two previous heart attacks, who cannot walk unassisted. His opponents logically don’t expect him to live very long and don’t consider invoking Robert Bellarmine’s hypothetical for the deposition of a pope to be worth it in any but the most egregious cases(eg attempting to name cardinal Fernandez as coadjutor to the diocese of Rome). This is probably playing into the ‘why now’ aspect of things; Müller will simply find it harder to gain the necessary support to invoke the Bellarmine process when ‘just wait for him to die’ is referring to a man who is currently planning his own funeral because it’s not far off(that isn’t a joke; pope Francis publicized nonstandard funeral plans for himself late last week).

invoke the Bellarmine process

It's not like everyone follows Bellarmine on this anyway, it's a matter of contention.

with cancer

afaik this is just a rumor.

True, it’s never been confirmed by the Vatican, but it’s generally considered true by insiders as far as I can tell, and the Vatican usually won’t admit when popes have serious diseases.

Cancer kind of a weird one these days, isn't it? Not that it isn't serious in most cases, but huge difference between Grade 2 somewhere treatable and Grade 4 Pancreatic.

Yeah, this is... a lot.

I need to go read the original document, but I have to say that despite acknowledging Francis' emphasis on being a shepherd and not a judge, I know that there are a zillion liberal clergy who are gonna go right out and officiate full-blown same-sex weddings in churches, under the guise of a 'blessing'. Happened to the Anglicans, no reason to think it won't happen to us.

The ruling itself seems pretty eminently reasonable, to the point I wonder why it was even a ruling. Blessings are just generally allowed for people, right? No matter who they are? Why specify, then, that gay couples can receive generic blessings?

At the same time, this is how sprinkling went from a valid-under-certain-circumstances method of baptism to the only method.

Why specify, then, that gay couples can receive generic blessings?

It comes in under the matter of answering questions about "irregular unions" (mostly, straight people in relationships which used to be called 'living in sin' for whatever reasons) and the gay blessing stuff was tacked on as, literally, "oh yeah and you can do this for gays too".

Blessing of a union is not simply a generic blessing, and that's what the whole tally-ho is about. Are you (1) giving a blessing to two individuals who ask for it, as individuals? (2) blessing them as a couple? (3) if as a couple, blessing them as in a valid union? (4) is this going to sneak in gay marriage by the back door, as happened the Anglicans who started off with "yeah you can bless gay people but this totally is not blessing the gay relationship" and then ended up with "okay here's a form of service for a same-sex marriage in church just like the straights".

It is a direct reversal of policy. This document was published scarcely two years ago:

TO THE QUESTION PROPOSED: Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?

RESPONSE: Negative.

Doesn't sound like that has changed. The unions are still not being blessed (or at least not supposed to be).

Yeah blessing a union between people, and blessing the people themselves, are two very different things.

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