"A ‘selective' church, one of ‘pure blood,' is not Holy Mother Church, but rather a sect," the Pope explained in a handwritten reply to questions from Fr James Martin, a Jesuit priest and founder of Outreach.

This is the crucial line.

From the start of his pontificate, Francis has called for the Church to be like a field hospital, one that opens its doors to everyone on the basis of their faith, not their sexuality.

His use of the phrase "pure blood" is significant because it resists any attempt to impose an ideological purity on the Church as if it were a "sect".

When it comes to LGBTQ Catholics the temptation is often to exclude or reject, but Francis' remarks show this is the very opposite of what it means to be Catholic, which by definition means universal and all-embracing.

For the Pope, the Church of the "pure blood" ends up as an exclusive club.

While critics have accused Francis of advocating a lax approach which does not respect doctrine and tradition, his remarks point to a different approach which is rooted in the nature of God and the words of Jesus.

"God is Father and he does not disown any of his children," the Pope explained in a brief set of remarks which crystallise much of his thinking in this area. "And ‘the style' of God is ‘closeness, mercy and tenderness.' Along this path, you will find God."

It's a simple, yet powerful statement. God's love, Francis points out, is not contingent on an individual's sexual orientation nor is it dependent on the passing of an ideological purity test.

Nothing can stop any individual in their search for God who in turn meets each person where they are. This is at the heart of what Francis said in 2013.

"If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge?" he told journalists.

The five words: "Who am I to judge?" did a huge amount to start shifting the "anti-gay" perception of the Church.

One of the distinctive features of the Pope's approach to LGBTQ issues is his refusal to make it a wedge issue in the culture wars nor does he allow the Church's opposition to same-sex marriage to become a "banner" of Catholic identity.

He resists any attempts to frame the issues in terms of a dry "legalism or clerical moralism", seen so often in official Church documents on homosexuality that generally start with a negative. His focus is pastoral and person-centred.

In the latest interview, Francis addresses the question of LGBTQ Catholics who feel rejected by the Church saying they should not see this as a rejection by "the Church" but by certain individuals.

The Pope then goes a step further by suggesting that any rejection of someone on the grounds of sexual orientation ignores the scriptures. Francis cites Jesus' parable of the Wedding Feast where invitations were sent out "to the just, the sinners, the rich and the poor ..." which gives the message that the Kingdom of God is open to all.

The Pope also urges queer Christians who have experienced rejection to read the Acts of the Apostles which shows the "image of the living church", showing that the heart of the Church is not a remote institution that issues condemnations but a living, inclusive community.

Earlier this year, I argued that the Church has slowly begun to change its approach on the issue of LGBTQ Catholics with the 2021-2023 synod process making the historic move to officially include groups such as New Ways Ministry in Church discussions.

The Pope's remarks point to that shift but they also leave open the question: what next? Continue reading

• Christopher Lamb is a British journalist who is the Rome Correspondent for Catholic publication The Tablet. He is a contributor to the Vatican Insider page of La Stampa and a regular commentator for the BBC on Vatican and religious affairs

One of them, for instance, was the "Chinese rites" controversy in the 17thand 18thcenturies. This would influence the way the Church approached Chinese traditions and cultures, as well religious pluralism, right up until at least the dawn of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

We are at a similar juncture in ecclesiology — i.e. the way we conceive of the Catholic Church.

Catholic politicians and abortion

Take the recent controversy surrounding Catholic politicians in the United States and the reception of the Eucharist. It has pitted a "party" within the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) against President Joe Biden and has again revealed that the USCCB is out of step with the pastoral approach of Pope Francis.

This situation is worrying for more than just those who are directly involved because the way this issue is played out will have consequences on the future of the Church and its self-understanding.

Many US bishops have been urging the USCCB to release a document that would bar — or at least intimidate — Catholic politicians who favour the current laws that legalize abortion from receiving Holy Communion at Mass.

This is something that has already affected the liturgical habits of some prominent Catholic politicians, as a US senator revealed in a recent interview with the Jesuit-run magazine, America.

At the USCCB summer gathering last June, some 73% of the bishops voted in favour of drafting such a document.

The proposal was backed by 168 of the 273 prelates eligible to vote. Only 55 opposed the plan, while another six abstained. (The 160 retired bishops in the conference cannot cast a ballot.)

A document on the Eucharist

After the vote in June, a special commission got busy drafting a document on the Eucharist, which the bishops will vote on this week as they gather in Baltimore for the USCCB's annual "fall meeting".

The document does not mention the issue of politicians and Communion. But the character of the discussion that takes place this week and in its aftermath will have an impact on the Church, no matter what the text's final version or whether it is approved by the necessary two-thirds majority.

The bishops have never threatened to deny Communion to conservative politicians who approve of other laws that are in clear contrast with the Church, such as the death penalty.

William Barr, a Catholic who actively promoted capital punishment as attorney general under Donald Trump, was never subjected to the sort of treatment the bishops are displaying towards Biden and other Democrats.

Still, there is no question that the way the United States has gone about legalising abortion, very differently from the approach most countries in Europe have taken, is highly problematic for Catholic teaching, to say the least.

And, certainly, the Church's pastors have a duty to teach on the subject.

The sacraments and the "culture wars"

But the problem is that the entire effort to penalize politicians of one political party is not just an accident. It is a feature of contemporary Catholicism's "culture wars", which began in the United States in 1980s and continued to spread in the 1990s.

The decade that began with the fall of Communism was marked by a search for a new identity and meaning, a separate new symbolic universe. Then in 2001 the 9/11 attacks sparked the globalization of these American culture wars.

The tension that currently exists between the Vatican and the contingent of US bishops over the issue of Biden and the Eucharist signals a further escalation of the Catholic culture wars, which have now invaded the field of the Church's sacraments.

This is a new phenomenon.

While in the past century some in the Church have politicized certain popular devotions (e.g. to the Virgin Mary or the Sacred Heart), the sacraments were never politicized per se.

Indeed, the Holy Office did excommunicate Communists in 1949, during the pontificate of Pius XII. But this is not a fitting example, because it is the story of a failure.

When the then-Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli's private secretary told him that some overzealous Catholics had complained about seeing Communists receive Holy Communion during a Mass at his Sotto il Monte birthplace, the future John XXIII explained:

A person comes to the confessional, not the party or an ideology. This person is entrusted to our catechesis, our love, and our pastoral inventiveness.

It is necessary to proceed on a case-by-case basis, with extreme caution. If you force something on them drastically, they will not understand you, or they will understand backwards; if you reject them, they will go away and never come back.

What's happening to Catholicism in the United States?

Pope Francis and his Vatican aides are trying to protect Joe Biden's access to the sacraments.

This was made especially clear in a letter that Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, send to the USCCB president last May.

The pope's concern is not so much about Biden, but about what is happening to Catholicism in the United States.

What is at stake here is the catholicity of the Catholic Church — in the sense of non-sectarian and non-partisan.

This is not only a problem of the Church's credibility, but also of its self-understanding as a sacrament of salvation, as stated in the first chapter of Lumen Gentium, the Vatican II constitution on the Church.

The Catholic Church is currently living a moment that is the closest we can get to the time of the Council.

John XXIII called Vatican II in 1959 and published his most important encyclical, Pacem in Terris, in April 1963, a few months after the Cuban missile crisis.

The context was the Cold War, and the pope's intention was not just to contribute to world peace, but also to protect the Church from the all-absorbing ideological clash between Communism and the "free world".

A battlefield for the culture wars

In a similar way, Pope Francis has reintroduced a synodal culture in the Church and has opened a worldwide "synodal process" in the context of the culture wars.

He is trying to rescue the Church's capability by rebuffing the constant calls to align with a single "us vs. them" civilizational and political identity - calls that are especially loud within US Catholicism.

A clear example of what the pope is up against was manifest recently by Archbishops José Gomez, the USCCB president, while delivering a deeply divisive address via video to a conference in Spain. Gomez shocked many Catholics by attacking movements of "social justice", "wokeness", "identity politics", "intersectionality" and "successor ideology", calling them pseudo-religions.

This blatant case of the USCCB's politicization comes at a time when the Church can least afford it.

As Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the Australian Bishops' Conference, tweeted on November 12, "If the Eucharist is made a marker of difference (hence exclusion) rather than a sacrament of communion (hence inclusion), we have the second rather than the first."

The whole question is whether we see the Church as "a field hospital", as Francis defined it in his September 2013 interview with Antonio Spadaro SJ, or whether we see it as a battlefield for the culture wars.

The battlefield is all about separating those who are friends from those who are the enemies.

Paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum about politics and war, it could be said that in the Catholic Church the extension of the battlefield mentality to the sacraments is the continuation of the culture wars by other means.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Taking the name Francis, he won the admiration and respect of Catholics and non-Catholics alike with his simplicity and concern for the poor and marginalized.

With each passing year, however, criticism of the pope has become more vocal, especially from the Catholic right, who think he is breaking with traditional church teaching, and the political right, who don't like his views on global warming, immigration and social justice.

Francis has also been unable to satisfy those who say the Catholic hierarchy's response to the clergy sex abuse crisis has been inadequate.

I am a big fan of Pope Francis, in part because I think that any evaluation of his first six years as pope shows that his accomplishments outweigh his failings.

First, his accomplishments

Pope Francis has successfully rebranded the Catholic Church, which had come to be regarded as a clerical institution that stressed rules and uniformity.

If you wanted to be a good Catholic, you were given the catechism to memorize and told to follow the rules.

Francis hates clericalism.

He is constantly telling bishops and priests not to act like princes but rather like servants to the people of God.

While he is kind and compassionate to the wider world, he can be very critical when speaking to bishops and priests.

He warns against the temptation to manipulate or infantilize the laity.

He urges clerics to empower the laity "to continue discerning, in a way befitting their growth as disciples, the mission which the Lord has entrusted to them."

For Francis, the church is not a country club for the good and beautiful. Rather, it is a "poor church for the poor," a "field hospital" for the wounded. That is why he stresses compassion and mercy.

In contrast to the last two popes, who taught using complex theological concepts, Francis appeals to the heart.

He complains that "we have reduced our way of speaking about mystery to rational explanations, but for ordinary people the mystery enters through the heart."

He believes that "we lose people because they don't understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and impart an intellectualism foreign to our people."

This is not a pope who will worry, as we did in the previous papacy, about whether the translation of the Nicene Creed should say that Jesus is "one in being" or "consubstantial" with the Father.

Francis' focus on the simple message of the gospel is quite threatening to those Catholics who confuse theology with the faith.

Theology is how we explain the faith to ourselves and others. Augustine used Neoplatonism to explain the faith to a generation whose intellectuals were all Neoplatonists.

Thomas Aquinas used Aristotelianism, the avant-garde thinking of the 13th century, to explain the faith in his day.

The mistake today's conservatives make is to simply quote these great thinkers, rather than imitate them in developing new ways to explain Christianity to people of the 21st century.

With few Neoplatonists or Aristotelians around today, theolog

ians must have the freedom to discover new ways of explaining Christianity, even if this leads to new ways of understanding of human rights, justice, sexuality, marriage and the role of women.

Unlike his predecessors, Francis is not afraid of encouraging discussion in the church. Continue reading

• Thomas Reese SJ is is a senior analyst at Religion News Service, and a former columnist at National Catholic Reporter, and a former editor-in-chief of the weekly Catholic magazine America.
• Image: GCN