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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
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:
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.
Quick reminder to everyone that Islam exists and does not suffer from this ... problem ...
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.
Why the past tense? It was a live issue for the US in Afghanistan.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Having a Pope?
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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)
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Well, yes, but it's not all doom and gloom: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tnYxxsIO8uc&t=59
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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.
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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.
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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.
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