Pope Francis ended his historic ten-day visit to America on September 27. Just days later, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis began testifying about how he had invited her for a private audience and blessed her grandstanding defense of traditional marriage. No doubt you recall the media spectacle Davis created last month, when she “martyred” herself by getting thrown in jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples – as required by law.
Media reports on her one-woman crusade abounded; and far too many social critics deemed it worthy of comment. I did not.
In fact, everything about the pope and this dope left me dismayed. After all, one of the things I found so endearing about this pontiff was his “judge-not” regard for people’s sexual orientation.
Not to mention that, as reported, his meeting with this Pharisaic homophobe reeked of deceit. Hell, Davis seemed to think the pope and she were emulating the biblical meeting between Jesus and King Nicodemus.
But oh how Pope Francis restored my faith in his liberal Christian message when he instructed the Vatican Curia to correct the record.
For this entailed not only clarifying that Davis was just one of dozens he met in a receiving line at the Vatican embassy, but also publishing a video of the pope embracing a former pupil and his gay partner. What’s more, the latter occurred during what appears to have been a bona fide private audience.
The day before Pope Francis met anti-gay county clerk Kim Davis in Washington last week, he held a private meeting with a longtime friend from Argentina who has been in a same-sex relationship for 19 years.
Yayo Grassi, an openly gay man, brought his partner, Iwan Bagus, as well several other friends to the Vatican Embassy on September 23 for a brief visit with the Pope. A video of the meeting shows Grassi and Francis greeting each other with a warm hug.
(CNN, October 3, 2015)
This video speaks volumes (about his regard for homosexual couples), especially given the Vatican’s refusal to release even a picture of Davis meeting him, which no doubt she and her enablers devoutly prayed to receive.
Unfortunately, events unfolded in Rome just days later that undermined this spiritually uplifting video, much as this video undermined Davis’s mendacious testimony about the pope blessing her homophobic crusade.
Foremost, a priest held a press conference to out himself, using the pope’s own words of acceptance and inclusion to profess his abiding faith. The Vatican was not amused.
The Vatican on Saturday dismissed a gay priest from his Holy See job on the eve of a major Church meeting for a highly public coming out that challenged the Roman Catholic teaching that homosexual acts are a sin…
Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a Polish theologian, had worked at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal arm, since 2003.
‘I ask the pope to be strong and to remember us, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals and bisexuals as children of the Church and members of humanity,’ Charamsa said.
(Reuters, October 3, 2015)
But the Vatican’s reaction was as ripe with irony as it was rife with hypocrisy:
The irony is that, in outing himself, this priest stood with his partner, looking every bit as loving and committed a couple as the pope’s former pupil and his partner did in that Vatican-released video of their private audience with him.
To say nothing of papal fallibility, to put it charitably, which this humanistic pope showed the very next day, when he consecrated the Catholic Church’s dogmatic opposition to gay marriage. .
It came, appropriately enough, during his opening homily at St. Peter’s Basilica for the Synod on the Family – complete with the confounding moral fiction about hating the sin and not the sinner:
This is God’s dream for his beloved creation: to see it fulfilled in the loving union between a man and a woman, rejoicing in their shared journey, fruitful in their mutual gift of self…
The Church must search out these persons, welcome and accompany them, for a Church with closed doors betrays herself and her mission, and, instead of being a bridge, becomes a roadblock.
(Reuters, October 4, 2015)
The hypocrisy is that the Vatican authorities who sacked this priest are very likely themselves openly gay … within the closeted and cloistered confines of the Vatican.
Remarkably, Francis is just the latest pontiff who seems perfectly content to countenance this hypocrisy. This, notwithstanding that he and his predecessor, Benedict XVI, have lamented publicly about a gay cabal wielding unholy influence in the Vatican.
I duly commented: with respect to Francis in “Pope Confesses: There’s a Gay Cabal in the Vatican,” June 13, 2013, and with respect to Benedict in “Report on Gay Cabal in Vatican Forced Pope to Resign…?” February 26, 2013, which includes this excerpt.
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A gay cabal in the Vatican continues to indulge and cover-up the sexual exploits of gay priests, including abuse by pedophiles.
(“The Pope Comes to America,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 16, 2008)
Frankly, gay cabals have been making a mockery of every religious edict the Holy See has issued for centuries. The only difference now is that the stench of the pedophile scandal is causing even reporters to turn up their noses at everything that stinks in the state of the Vatican…
Nothing demonstrates how desperate the Vatican is to calm these troubled waters quite like the extraordinary step it took to issue a papal denunciation of reports about homosexual priests turning Vatican City into a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah…
Except that no sooner had the Vatican issued this denunciation than the pope was obliged to accept the resignation of Britain’s top Catholic, Cardinal Keith O’Brien. He was forced to resign over allegations that he not only covered-up for pedophile priests, but also made inappropriate sexual advances on a number of seminarians under his charge in the early 1980s. He will become the first cardinal to be excommunicated from a Papal Conclave in church history.
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This is only a little of what informs my abiding belief that celibacy among Catholic priests is more about self-hatred (of being homosexual) than self-denial (of homosexual activity).
And so the institutional hypocrisy and moral fiction continue – despite even a putatively traditional Catholic country like Ireland defying the church by legalizing same-sex marriage, which I hailed in “Holy Matrimony! Catholic Ireland Becomes Trailblazer for Gay Rights,” May 26, 2015.
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It might seem a surreal joke, but Ireland became the first nation in the world to legalize gay marriage in national referendum on Friday…
Leaders of the Irish Catholic Church mounted a crusade against this referendum. Except that these are the very leaders who the pope has publicly criticized for showing more devotion to religious traditions and practices than to the word and spirit of the Almighty God…
Their traditions and practices include condemning homosexuality while:
- Engaging in homosexual/pedophile acts themselves.
- Providing indulgences for priests who sexually abuse (aka rape) little boys.
- Knowing full well that a ‘gay cabal’ has always wielded dogmatic power in their Holy Curia.
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Related commentaries:
Love pope, not his message…
Benedict – gay cabal…
Pope confesses…
Ireland legalizes gay marriage…