No, Pope Francis Is Not the LGBT Person of the Year

English: Michelangelo Signorile at the Copacabana in New York for the launch of Michael Musto’s new book, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Michelangelo Signorile | Huffington Post | December 18, 2013

The Advocate magazine put Pope Francis on its cover, proclaiming him the Person of the Year, offering a myriad of reasons why it passed up others, such as Edie Windsor. The best thing about this is that Francis has a “NoH8” decal Photoshopped onto his face, and it’s driving poor Bill Donohue of the Catholic League into a blood-vessel-popping rage.

But mostly, this was idiotic. Pope Francis is a lot of things to many people in the world. But he is not our hero of  the LGBT community in 2013. Can we please get a grip, folks? Are we that starved for validation?

Pope Francis’ statements of the past, which he’s never repudiated, and the doctrine of his church, are horrendously homophobic. As Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina three years ago, he called gay marriage the work of the devil and said it was “a destructive attack on God’s plan.” And his recent statements, saying church leaders are too “obsessed” with the issue of gay marriage, and that he can’t pass judgement a gay priest, while very encouraging, do not in any way take back those statements.

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Noting Pope Francis Is “Not Pro-Gay,” Advocate Names Him Person of the Year

Emblem of the Papacy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

PAUL SCHINDLER | Gay City News | December 17, 2013

Writing that “Pope Francis is still not pro-gay by today’s standard,” the Advocate magazine has named the new leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics its Person of the Year.

“Like it or not, what he says makes a difference,” the magazine argued in making its announcement on December 16. “Sure, we all know Catholics who fudge on the religion’s rules about morality. There’s a lot of disagreement, about the role of women, about contraception, and more. But none of that should lead us to underestimate any pope’s capacity for persuading hearts and minds in opening to LGBT people, and not only in the US but globally.”

The magazine hung its faith in Francis’ “capacity” –– and willingness –– “for persuading hearts and minds in opening to LGBT people” on several comments the new pope made in recent months.

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Pope Francis, The Choice

Pope Francis met with media (Photo credit: Catholic Church (England and Wales))

Nancy Gibbs | TIME Magazine | December 11, 2013

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.

How do you practice humility from the most exalted throne on earth? Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly—young and old, faithful and cynical—as has Pope Francis. In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power.

At a time when the limits of leadership are being tested in so many places, along comes a man with no army or weapons, no kingdom beyond a tight fist of land in the middle of Rome but with the immense wealth and weight of history behind him, to throw down a challenge. The world is getting smaller; individual voices are getting louder; technology is turning virtue viral, so his pulpit is visible to the ends of the earth. When he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes the feet of a Muslim woman, the image resonates far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.
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Is Pope Francis a Marxist — or just a Good Catholic?

English: Rush Limbaugh at CPAC in February 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Frank Cocozzelli | Talk2Action | December 1, 2013

This post is reworked from one I wrote during last year’s presidential election campaign entitled, Is Redistribution Marxism? No, Just Good Catholic Doctrine!.  In light of Rush Limbaugh and Fox Business News host Stuart Varney’s strong suggestions that Pope Francis is espousing “Marxism” let’s once again set the record straight. – FLC

Rush Limbaugh and Stuart Varney seem to be confused and perplexed by Pope Francis’s recently encyclical, Evangelii Gadium (Joy of the Gospel). Perhaps the term “threatened” is a more accurate description. They have accused the pope of advocating Marxism in place of capitalism.

This is, of course stale, left-over McCarthyism — the same old game of slandering any sort of reform economics – even those solidly based upon capitalism — as either “Socialism” or “Marxism.”  But what Limbaugh and Varney probably have no idea that His Holiness is advocating nothing more than “Good Catholic doctrine.”

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Catholic Bishops Elect New Leader Who Says He Wants Less Emphasis On Gay Marriage

Sacred Heart Catholic Church (Photo credit: enkrates)

On Top Magazine | November 13, 2013

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville on Tuesday was overwhelmingly elected to lead the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops.

As the new president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Kurtz serves as the church’s national spokesman in the United States.

After his election, Kurtz, 67, vowed to follow Pope Francis’ call to move the church away from divisive social issues such as gay marriage, contraception and abortion.  Francis, elected last March, has said that he wants the church to emphasize mercy and compassion over cultural issues.

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Darn that Pope

Timothy Kincaid | Box Turtle Bulletin | November 12, 2013

Darn that Pope Francis, he’s at it again!!  Trying to cause trouble for the American Bishops and other lovers of theocracy and autocratic doctrine.

Earlier this year he stuck his nose in the fine running machine of Catholic hierarchy and caused a big stink by suggesting that the Church’s sole purpose actually wasn’t to oppose gay marriage, contraception, and abortion.  As if he really didn’t know that these three issues are the single most important concerns to the lay Catholics who go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning terrified that through these evils the population may have shrunk overnight to an unsustainable low.

And now he’s gone off the deep end.  His representative to the American Catholic Bishops suggested that Bishops not live lives of opulence and privilege.  Come on!!  They aren’t called ‘Princes of the Church’ for nothing, you know.

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What Pope Francis has known about gay priests

Pope Francis Portrait Painting (Photo credit: faithmouse)

The Rev. Irene Monroe | San Diego Gay & Lesbian News | September 26, 2013

Pope Francis continues to send seismic shock waves across the globe with his liberal-leaning pronouncements. And they are the most affirmative remarks the world has ever heard on the dicey subjects of abortion, contraception and same-gender marriage.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” Pope Francis said last week in wide-ranging interview with 16 Jesuit publications.

However, for many religious conservatives, the Pontiff’s remarks are heretical, and they vehemently contested that Pope Frances has not only desecrated century-old church doctrine, but also that he has diminished his authority as the head of the church.

But as the Pontiff aptly stated in his interview “the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards” should the Catholic Church, in this 21st century, continue on it anti-modernity trek like his predecessor.

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Pope Francis and His Followers Backslide –– Already

English: Emblem of Vatican City Italiano: Emblema della Ciattà del Vaticano Македонски: Амблем на Ватикан {| cellspacing=”0″ style=”min-width:40em; color:#000; background:#ddd; border:1px solid #bbb; margin:.1em;” class=”layouttemplate” | style=”width:1.2em;height:1.2em;padding:.2em” | 20px |link=|center | style=”font-size:.85em; padding:.2em; vertical-align:middle” |This vector image was created with Inkscape. |} Emblem of Vatican City.svg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

PAUL SCHINDLER | Gay City News | September 24, 2013

Just days after an interview with the Jesuit magazine America in which Pope Francis signaled a promising new tone on the gay community comes word that an Australian priest has been defrocked and excommunicated for his views on homosexuality and women priests.

The International Business Times, on September 23, reported that actions taken against Father Greg Reynolds, who resigned from his Melbourne parish under pressure in 2011, originated at the Vatican under the authority of Francis.

The newspaper reported that the order, written in Latin, did not specify a reason for the extraordinary steps the Vatican took.

Reynolds said he adopted his favorable views on marriage equality and the ordination of women as a matter of “conscience.”

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Pope Francis: Sexism With a Human Face?

Katha Pollitt | The Nation | AlterNet | September 28, 2013

Pope Francis seems a lovely man. He washes the feet of prisoners, drives a Ford Focus and lives in the Vatican guesthouse instead of the isolated papal apartments. He even calls people who write him with their troubles. In July, he made headlines when he said of gay priests, “Who am I to judge?” Most recently, he astonished the world with a long interview in America, the Jesuit magazine, in which he said the church is too “obsessed” with abortion, gay rights and birth control and risked becoming a “house of cards.”

Liberals are ecstatic. The theologian Daniel Maguire, who has championed reproductive rights for decades, heralded the pope’s words in a piece titled “The End of the Catholic Church’s Pelvic Zone Orthodoxy.”  New York Times columnist Frank Bruni was happy about the “olive branch” extended to gays, rhapsodized over the pope’s “modesty” and “humility,” and advised President Obama to emulate him. (Modesty and humility being definitely not part of a columnist’s brief, why not urge a total stranger, the president, to remodel his character?) Even Catholics for Choice was warily hopeful. As for non-Catholics, one friend of mine summed up the feelings of many: if he really means this, she announced, I’m converting.

Not so fast. Of course it’s refreshing to see a change from the all-abortion-all-the-time programming of the last two popes, who did not seem to mind how many faithful drifted away as long as the ones who remained held fast to official teachings. “Fewer but better” cadres, as Lenin succinctly put it. Liberals are so fed up with American prelates fulminating against homosexuality, comparing abortion to the Holocaust and allying themselves with the Republican Party that they have seized on the pope’s words as signaling a change in the church’s teachings, the way they did when Pope Benedict XVI seemed to say condoms were permissible to prevent AIDS. (Actually, he didn’t quite say that.) There has been no doctrinal change, nor is there likely to be one anytime soon. Rather, the pope was calling for a change of tone and emphasis: forbid with love. “Like Jesus, he’s saying, hate the sin, love the sinner,” said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who as president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has helped lead the church’s war against gay marriage, abortion and the Affordable Care Act. As the Catholic conservative George Weigel put it in National Review, “Francis underscored that ‘the teaching of the Church is clear’ on issues like abortion, euthanasia, the nature of marriage, and chastity and that he is ‘a son of the Church’ who accepts those teachings as true.”

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Pope Francis’s Vatican Excommunicates Pro-LGBT Priest

John M. Becker | Bilerico | September 24, 2013

Last week, Pope Francis once again made international headlines by saying something nice about LGBT people. And just like the last time Francis had nice-sounding words for our community, I was the proverbial fly in the ointment, counseling caution even as others tripped over themselves to praise the pontiff. As I noted then, Francis’s words represented a change in tone, not in teaching — and while that’s very nice and all, the way the official Church treats gays and lesbians isn’t likely to improve in anything more than a superficial manner until Catholicism no longer calls us “intrinsically disordered.”

Sadly, just days after Pope Francis scolded his church for being “obsessed” with LGBT rights and women’s rights, his Vatican is proving exactly how little has actually changed: Fr. Greg Reynolds (above), a Roman Catholic priest from Australia, was excommunicated from that church — get this — because he supports marriage equality and women’s ordination. And the order came right from the Vatican.

The document excommunicating Father Greg Reynolds was written in Latin, and which gave no reasons, came from the Vatican, and came just days after Pope Francis’ speech.

Father Reynolds had told The Age that he expected to be defrocked, but that he did not expect to be excommunicated.

“In times past excommunication was a huge thing, but today the hierarchy have lost such trust and respect,” he said.

“I’ve come to this position because I’ve followed my conscience on women’s ordination and gay marriage… The Vatican never contacted me, and it gives no explanation.”

Excommunication is the method by which the Catholic Church kicks people out, formally excludes them from the community of believers. Its use as a penalty is exceedingly rare and is reserved only for what it views as the most serious of sins.

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