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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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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.

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.

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