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Notes -
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.
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?
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).
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.
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