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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.
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.
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.)
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:
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.
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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:
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