Pope Francis says anti-gay bishops have ‘closed hearts’

Even if the Pope was pro-LGBTI, he can’t ignore the conservative Bishops, who have threatened he could be “separating the church along Protestant lines”.

The joint document “Christian Witness in a multi-religious World”, signed by the Vatican, the World Council of Churches and the World Evangelical Alliance, among others had two effects: in many nations Catholics see Evangelicals less and less as a sect one should bypass and more and more as a valid partner, convinced of its differences, but willing to serve the larger church.

Cardinal Nichols acknowledged that the Synod was far from unanimous on the need for change, but said that its decisions had given the Pope the confidence to pursue the path he has chosen.

With time running out, the synodal fathers appear no closer to resolving their conflicts over issues facing the family than they were a year ago.

They suggested that a few divorced and Catholics, in consultation with their priests, could “take steps” to participate more fully in “liturgical, pastoral, educative and institutional areas” of the church.

“That language automatically sets people off, and probably isn’t useful anymore”, said Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, one of nine US bishops at the synod. We are “sinful”. In the synod document released yesterday, it revealingly talks to the families of gay people: not to gay people themselves. Why?

Bishops from around the world adopted a final document Saturday at the end of a divisive, three-week synod that exposed the split in the church between conservatives and progressives over how to better minister to Catholic families today.

“I think Pope Francis will be very encouraged”.

One group of bishops, led by Cardinal Walter Kasper, would like to see a pastoral solution that would allow a penitential process leading to Communion for such Catholics, but this is opposed by others, perhaps a majority, who feel that this would violate church doctrine.

During the Synod itself, Sarah equated Islamic fundamentalism with “the idolatry of Western freedom,” saying they both present a threat as great as Nazism and Communism. There is no willingness to accept the first marriage as irrevocably broken and destroyed, which would allow the parties to move on with their lives.

Pope Francis has closed a synod about family issues by delivering a homily calling for a more open-hearted Church with debate swirling as to whether the meeting was a defeat for the Argentine pontiff’s views.

Based on this, Pope Francis is expected to issue, during this special Jubilee year of mercy, an apostolic exhortation that will guide the Catholic Church, its leaders and faithful, for years to come. However, it stressed that “there is no foundation whatsoever to assimilate or establish analogies, even remotely, between homosexual unions and God’s design for marriage and the family”. The bishops were hashing out big issues like how the church deals with divorce and gay marriage.

This proposition didn’t even receive a mention in the final document.

The bishops concluded that church teaching would remain – it was agreed that homosexuals should not be discriminated against but said there were “absolutely no grounds” for gay marriage.

The pope will take the recommendations of the bishops into account when drafting his own teaching on the family, and The New York Times reports that liberals say the final document succeeds at not tying his hands in too many areas.

Grant Gallicho, associate editor of the left-wing journal Commonweal, also claimed victory because the Synod document did not explicitly reject the notion of communion for the divorced and remarried.