Still about the hate…
In a statement approved by Pope Francis, the Vatican referred to homosexuality as a “choice”, suggested it is sinful and said it “cannot be recognized as objectively ordered” to God’s plans. This highlights how the Roman Catholic Church continues to discriminate against LGBTQIA people.
Pope Francis has been positioning himself as a (relatively) more progressive head of Christianity. In October 2020, for instance, he was quoted in “Francesco“, a documentary by Evgeny Afineevsky, to have expressed his support for the legal protection of LGBTQIA people in relationships by calling for the passage of civil union laws.
“Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family,” Pope Francis said at that time. “They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable because of it.”
The newer statement from the Vatican provided to answer a question presented to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, i.e. “Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?”
In response, it stated that “the blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit”, and that God “does not and cannot bless sin.”
Harking back to more antiquated times, the Vatican actually also continued to express its opposition to sexual activity outside of marriage, stressing that sex should only happen for procreation and for women to becomes tools “to the transmission of life”. This is connected to LGBTQIA relationships since same-sex relationships exist sans the aim to procreate.
Seemingly not wanting to be seen as discriminatory, the Vatical added: “The declaration of the unlawfulness of blessings of unions between persons of the same sex is not therefore, and is not intended to be, a form of unjust discrimination, but rather a reminder of the truth of the liturgical rite and of the very nature of the sacramentals, as the Church understands them.”
In the end, the statement is said not to “preclude the blessings given to individual persons with homosexual inclinations” so long as they “manifest the will to live in fidelity to the revealed plans of God as proposed by Church teaching.”
