This news just in...

The Pope did not say, "If a person is gay, who am I to judge?"

Fr. Ed nails it. What the Pope actually said had a huge qualifier that is not being correctly quoted in the media (a media that has made Catholic bashing an all American past time for centuries). What the Pope said (in the context of a question about a 'gay lobby' in the Vatican) was, "If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge that person?" 'To be seeking the Lord and have good will' is a huge qualifier. This was not an approval of any and all homosexual activity.

But it does not really matter. I have come to believe that when anything having to do with sexuality comes up in any context, people hear whatever they want to hear, whether it has any basis in what was actually said or not. Eventually the media's honeymoon with Pope Francis will be over when they realize he is staunchly Catholic and is not going to re-make the Catholic faith into their own weird, secular liberal image. Even in this same interview, the Pope clearly said the church has definitively taught that women's ordination is off the table. If you read the entire transcript of what the Pope said, virtually everything was completely orthodox. Even the sentence after the 'who am I to judge' comment, he quotes the Catholic Catechism.

This news just in...the Pope is Catholic. Film at 11.  

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