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Last week, Pope Francis loosed a media tsunami by dropping a pebble of sanity into an ocean of religious angst. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” he told reporters on the flight back to Rome after his trip to Brazil.
What did it mean? Was he changing church teaching? And how might it affect 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide?
Hundreds of news stories and thousands of blogs, tweets and commentaries later, most observers heard in Francis’ statement a proposal to end to his predecessor’s hard line on homosexuality. Pope Benedict XVI had barred men with “deep-seated homosexual” tendencies from seminaries, calling homosexuality an “objective disorder.” But Francis said gays who sought to live faithfully — that is, celibate — were not to be judged or excluded from the church.
By looking to the individual’s heart instead of his genitals, Francis demonstrated a commitment to those who are neglected, marginalized and disenfranchised, as he repeatedly has done during his four-month papal tenure. Yet there is one group more numerous than LGBTs in the church and significantly more neglected, disenfranchised and marginalized — for whom his ministrations fall short.
Who, you ask? Roman Catholic women.
During the same interview on the papal plane, Francis said, “Women in the church are more important than bishops and priests,” just as “Mary is more important than the apostles.” Continuing, the pope said the church needed to develop a theology that addressed the role of women. But, he clearly stated, those roles would never include the ordained ministry because Pope John Paul II expressly forbade it. (I leave it to Catholic scholars and theologians to explain why Francis can all but countermand Benedict’s directives on gays but not John Paul’s on women.) Continue reading
Sources
- Diane Winston in Los Angeles Times
- Image: DioSCG
Diane Winston teaches media and religion at USC’s Annenberg School.
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News category: Analysis and Comment.
