✣ Being gay does not matter, Pope tells abuse survivor
What happened? Juan Carlos Cruz, one of three Chilean abuse survivors who met Pope Francis last month, gave an interview to the Spanish newspaper El País in which he said the Pontiff told him: “Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like this and loves you like this and it doesn’t matter to me. The Pope loves you like this, you have to be happy with who you are.” A Vatican spokesman declined to confirm or deny the remarks as they were part of the Pope’s private conversations. What the vaticanisti are saying The headline on Drudge Report, an influential US news aggregation site, was: “Pope shock: OK to be gay. ‘God made you like this.’” Vatican correspondents stressed that the comments, even if quoted accurately, represented no change to Church teaching. Robert Mickens of La Croix told the Daily Telegraph that it was “not a shift in theological teaching or dogma”, but rather a “pastoral response to an individual”. The Pope, he said, “always likes to deal with the individual”. Many outlets cited the Pope’s remark in 2013 – that “if someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” Christopher Lamb, Rome correspondent for the Tablet, said the new comments went “beyond ‘who am I to judge?’ to ‘you are loved by God’.” The Jesuit author Fr James Martin told the Los Angeles Times that the remarks were a “big deal”. “I cannot remember the Pope making a comment about gay people being born that way,” he said. “Pope Francis has repeated what all reputable biologists and psychologists say – you don’t choose your sexual orientation.” Dominican Fr Thomas Petri criticised Fr Martin for promoting the Pope’s apparent remarks. He pointed out that they had not been confirmed and could “easily be interpreted as contrary to natural law and moral teaching”. By promoting the quote, Fr Petri said on Twitter, Fr Martin was making the Pope a “source of division”. “A priest should know better,” he wrote. The Catechism says that the “psychological genesis” of homosexuality “remains largely unexplained”.
