This week, hundreds of delegates from around the world began a monthlong meeting as part of Pope Francis’ “Synod on Synodality”—a gathering to discuss the future of the Catholic Church. It could radically change the religion. The group is considering groundbreaking alterations to orthodoxy on same-sex unions and whether or not women can be ordained as priests. The process has changed, too. For the first time, delegates include women.
A synod is a conference for church leaders and lay people to engage in conversation about how to bolster the good of the church. Since the 1960s, delegates from the global church have come together to discuss evolving issues. The current synod is part one of a multi-year process that will culminate in 2024 with Francis’ decisions and includes particularly controversial topics, like celibacy and divorce.
The lead up has been punctuated by conservative concerns about just how liberal this meeting may get. The synod kicks off days after a letter became public in which the pope considered blessing the existence of queer couples and the allowance of female priests.
Pope Francis wrote that while marriage is an “exclusive, stable and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to conceiving children,” pastoral charity is also needed, and may be discretionary. Pastoral prudence, he wrote, “must adequately discern if there are forms of blessing, solicited by one or various persons, that don’t transmit a mistaken concept of marriage.” On female priesthood, the pope asserted that, whereas nobody can publicly contradict the church’s current rules prohibiting women’s ordination, they should study it.
For some, this rhetoric may seem like the bare minimum. But for others, like Americans on the right, it’s scary as hell.
Conservative Catholics across the U.S. have been some of the most vocal globally in pushing against reforms, and fear that the church is changing in a way that doesn’t match scripture or their ideology. One New York City priest, Reverend Gerald Murray, worried publicly that the pope “will authorize things that are not contained in Catholic doctrine or that will contradict it,” like women deacons or blessing gay unions. “We’re not Protestants,” he said.
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, Archbishop Emeritus of St. Louis, a vocal opponent to Pope Francis, was in the group that sent the pope a letter inquiring how he would be responding to these issues at the summit. “It’s unfortunately very clear,” Burke said on Tuesday, “that the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the part of some has as its aim to push forward an agenda that is more political and human than ecclesiastical and divine.” (Burke was not invited to the meeting at the Vatican.)
Pope Francis’ track record on queer and women’s rights is complicated. He formally allowed women to read from the Bible during Mass, but also came out against women becoming ordained. Speaking about queer people in 2013, the pope famously asked, “If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?” He has argued that homosexuality should not be treated as a crime in different countries but clarifies that he still thinks it’s a sin. Francis has framed many of these decisions as instances where localities should turn toward scripture and an evolving discernment as it befits their needs as part of his hope of growing the Catholic Church.
Because of this potential divide between local and global doctrine and application, it is possible that American Catholics may not even see these changes, should they be formally supported by the pope but not adopted by local priests.
As Mother Jones previously reported, American catholicism has splintered as some of the devout entrench themselves in wider conservative politics. Right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon notably have moved in Catholic circles saying Pope Francis should be curtailed. Yiannopoulos, who touts a traditionalist form of Catholicism, has been telling anyone who will listen to him, to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.”
The pope himself seems unfazed by the ire of American Catholics. “They got mad,” he told reporters in late August after a squabble. “But move on, move on.”
Until they start paying tax and stop molesting children all of them can fuck right off.
As someone who is not an only atheist but an anti-theist, I have no love for the Catholic Church and either its ancient, middle-age, or present form. However, I’m also a realist. For the Catholic Church to even be publicly willing to discuss such matters (especially things like LGBTQ issues and female ordainment), well, even I’ll admit that something decent may come from this in the end, even if it’s not all what decent society may want (or demand).
In its history, the Catholic Church has been on of the world’s most renowned institutions for being inflexible in its conservative dogma. Extremely rarely do the even ever discuss openness, especially publicly, to changing doctrine. This is one of those extremely few times. I would be extremely shocked if nothing came from this, especially considering the current pope.
Certainly, there are many tractors that will hold back the more radical of proposed changes, but now is the time where we will see any serious changes were likely to see for a long time within the Catholic Church. I’m excited to see what manages to get done at this synod.
I am sure this is a “be careful what you wish for” moment, but part of me is hoping that the American conservative Catholics are insane enough to try appointing their own Trump-aligned antipope and schism from the church, just so that the more rational Catholics in the US can have their literal “Come to Jesus” realization about how far gone the political right has become.
I firmly believe that there is a scary number of Americans who would get behind such a move. But at this point, I have just about accepted that the political divide in the US will not end peacefully, so if that’s our fate, I’d like to at least have the lines drawn cleanly.
You’re describing every form of Protestantism since Martin Luther.
C’mon…
A bit different; protestantism disagrees with the practice of having a centralized church at all, while other schisms in the Catholic church that took place in the past still maintained the church structure. They just appointed antipopes that were more politically aligned with their ideals.
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We don’t want something decent to come from the Catholic Church, though. It’s the fact that they are so backwards and hateful that is causing them to lose adherents like crazy. This is what needs to continue. Making moves like accepting women and LGBTQ people only helps them stay alive even longer.
For the Catholic Church to even be publicly willing to discuss such matters (especially things like LGBTQ issues and female ordainment), well, even I’ll admit that something decent may come from this in the end, even if it’s not all what decent society may want (or demand).
Nothing will come from this.
It’s not a “huh, maybe we were doing something wrong, maybe we should change” meeting, it’s a “Oh, the peasants are getting uppity again, quick, say that were graciously considering human rights or something to calm them down” meeting.
It’s the KKK holding a meeting considering on whether to allow black people to join.
Hey Hitler killed Hitler, so call it even?
Nah fuck those robed pedophiles till we strangle the last politician with the last ones entrails.
Wtf. I’m saying that the Catholic Church only makes major changes to dogma once a millennium or so, and I’m pretty interested in what they’re gonna do since it affects the lives of countless billions of people. You can quibble over the fact that you don’t get all you want, and I agree that they’re still a shitty theistic monolithic organization, but I was talking about what benefits a change in their dogma would bring, not fixating on the shortcomings.
I’m not your enemy.
Until the pope can stop his priests and congregation from fucking children, is there any reason to think there will be any positive change?
Like most figures in religion and Catholicism, the pope is a fairweather friend for Catholics. When he’s singing their tune they’re happy to quote him and laud him for his god given thoughts. When he isn’t, well we get exactly the reaction he’s been given: his own people saying he is wrong even though they were claiming he is God’s earthly representative just moments earlier.
I’m not outright saying nothing at all good can come of the effort to make change, as there will be some small minority that actually adhere to it, but I don’t see that happening for the vast majority of Catholics who will continue in their bigotry.
Change over generations will occur moreso, but I think that was coming regardless of his stance. At least that’s what recent history has shown us.
Until the pope can stop his priests and congregation from fucking children
Are you of the belief that the Pope has super powers?
No, but they do
You’re the one demanding the Pope be, at minimum, prescient, and ideally omniscient.
Take a second to chill there satan.
What the fuck are you going on about? Entrails and shit go get some fucking help, dude.
The gross shit you’re talking about here isn’t any better than what the church does. So who takes care of your entrails after you’ve de-entrailed all the people you decided need to go?
It’s a fairly famous quote.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-Denis DiderotIt doesn’t make it less psychotic
Right. it just exposes your illiteracy.
Hey, not knowing something isn’t wrong. It isn’t illiteracy to not have read whatever that is related to, remember the xkcd comic on today’s 10,000. I also only read the quote on lemmy.
Now their response is not the best of course.
And what are you going to do with your newfound decision that I’m illiterate? How are you justifying that against my apparent ability to read and write(type)? Thats rhetorical.
Sorry I’m not part of your life experience, and have my own which hasn’t exposed me to all the same things as you. I’m 100% positive that a great deal of what I consider common knowledge is lacking from your experience as well. Welcome to life.
Everybody better read up on this guy, or AlwaysNowNeverNotMe is gonna attack your basic human skillsets.
Denis Diderot
They can continue to fuck off even after that
Isn’t that like, part of the vows or something?
not just that but literally from this article:
“marriage is between a man and a woman”
no it fucking isnt. Source: all the places where you can get married without being a man and a woman.
they are saying pasta can only have red sauce while i eat a bowl of carbonara in front of them.
the best one can do now is say “marriage *should go back to being between a man and a woman”, which they won’t because they’re fucking cowards.
they should own up to their own stupid ass beliefs.
Yiannopoulos, who touts a traditionalist form of Catholicism, has been telling anyone who will listen to him, to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.”
My dude, you are queer. You married a man and were proudly gay until a year ago. You’re only just now faking a successful conversion to the straight life so your new Nazi friends don’t lynch you in town square.
Go back to Britain and stop making American politics worse than it already is. Or stick around and don’t act surprised when you inevitably get “Night of the Long Knives”-ed.
I went to google when his change happened (March 2021, for the record) and apparently since then he’s taken up the cause of fundraising for conversion camps… so that’s fun
Have you seen his pitch video for a Virgin Mary statue?
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1460270627651305476
The most vicious persecutors are those who attack in others what they repress in themselves.
I never thought of Milo as a fitter Ernst Röhm with highlights.
Reverend Gerald Murray, worried publicly that the pope “will authorize things that are not contained in Catholic doctrine or that will contradict it,”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Catholic doctrine is what the Pope says it is. The Pope is supposed to be God’s representative on Earth, or some bullshit like that.
Yes. You wouldn’t believe how many Americans think they know their god’s will better than god though.
I’ve said it for decades but misogyny is something conservatives will never let go. It’s part of their identity.
Misogyny is literally baked into the Bible.
1 Timothy 11-12
“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”
1 Corinthians 14:34-35
“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”
As an ex-Catholic and a strong atheist, I feel the need to point out that Catholics do not subscribe to the doctrine of sola scriptura - Biblical literalism as defined by a human institution - and considers it borderline heretical.
Very true.
I come from an evangelical background which I treat as ‘American Christianity’ as it’s the predominant, loudest, and currently most politically powerful sect. When we deal with the likes of trump supporters, they’ll be evangelicals almost across the board.
52% of Catholics voted for Trump in 2020:
A quick google estimates that there are between 45 and 72 millions Catholics in the US and between 90 and 100 million evangelicals.
This article says Catholics make up 12% of registered voters while evangelicals make up about 20%.
Between 77% and 84% of white evangelicals voted for trump depending on which reports you look at.
Evangelicals are the larger bloc, and a larger percentage of them voted trump.
Who gets to decide what the current views and rules of the church are, the pope? I’d assume it’s absolutely against the rules to question what the pope says then, right? So, anybody who isn’t in line with what the current pope is saying a heretic too.
The whole thing is so stupid. Just like every religion, even with the rules written down, often to a mind-numbing degree, it’s always subject to interpretation. Just see the vast difference in interpretation between what various muslim groups think women should be allowed / forbidden to show.
That was exactly my thought. Reverend Gerald Murray doesn’t seem to know some of the basics of Catholicism.
The same verses that the Pope drives his authority from say that he can so change stuff. Matthew 16:17-19.
17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, b and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades c will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be d bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be e loosed in heaven
As Lord Jiraiya’s representative on Earth, I can confirm this
12 years of Catholic school here and you would be correct, sir/madam.
So Vatican 3 basically.
Back in the day mass was done entirely in Latin and the priest didn’t address the congregation. This didn’t change until the '60s. Some sects are still pissed off over it
Wait, what… we aren’t even done with Vatican Council 2! 🤣
Don’t sweat it. These days nobody completes their papal backlog. It’s a running meme.
Just make sure to wait for the Christmas sales.
It turns out that The Vatican and Valve have more in common that previously believed.
“God is love.” -god
“That bastard!” - conservative worshipers
I feel like the most galling thing about xtianity is that you can be the most violent, murderous, racist, homophobic pos forever and, per doctrine, you’ll still be welcomed into heaven no matter what so long as you believe that the invisible sky friend exists.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ok. Let 'em be mad.
They’re already mad about something, I’m sure.
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Fairytale believers angry that fairytale is changing.
Raymond Burke is a piece of shit who covered up sexual abuse of children. How he’s still free blows my mind.
Wow, is Catholicism really ready to enter the 20th century!?
More accurate to say that some Catholic leaders are
lol I was asking
if we are going to control the population ever again, we are gonna have to make some comprimises, or continue shedding members to more rational trains of thought and self respect.
There I had the entire month of meetings for you.
I’ll take 10% of the churchs’ revenue now, please and thanks… Jesus said I need it more than you.
Easy there, 10% tithing is the Mormons. Catholics are more nuanced, using “what you can afford,” “what the church needs,” and guilt together.
My experience is mainly with Baptist and non-denominational. my family was poor as fuck, so the church urged us 10% instead of the commonly held 15%. I figured I’d return thier generosity…
I still don’t get how Christianity survived evolution.
Evolution = no Adam and Eve. No Adam and Eve = no Original Sin. No Original Sin = the entire Bible falls apart.
They must have used some serious white-out tape to work around that one.
Christianity’s never been about Original Sin. It’s been about fear of death and mitigation of that fear. Didn’t take long for people to see the inherent power this type of belief system provides for the purported “chosen speakers”.
The story starts with Original Sin. It’s where the Devil, sin, heaven and hell, and retribution and forgiveness all starts.
If you can’t have Eve biting the apple, you can’t have a Bible, period.
I refuse to argue this with you because it’s not a fair debate in the slightest…
Proceeds to anyway though apparently:
I’ve over a decade and a half of formal biblical education, read cover to cover umpteen times in a cornucopia of translations and revisions, and none of it matters for shit. The Bible is the Bible becuase it gives mankind a way out of death. NOBODY gives a fuck about the rest of it; that is all positioning, pomp, and self persuasion.
And let’s not pretend like the Bible makes any fucking sense to begin with so you crying about the Baseline rationale possibly being wrong makes zero sense.
Hey man, I’m on your side.
Sunday School, church, prayer, grace, Youth Group. I did it all, and I call it all horseshit now.
I’m just saying, once you get past all the introductions, the Bible opener is Original Sin. And once evolution became fact, that scene #1 of the Bible falls on its ass, so everything that follows it has to as well.
You realize that Jews, the people who wrote the Hebrew Bible that makes up what Christians call the old Testament, didn’t and do not believe in original sin? That’s a later christian invention, doesn’t even go back to Jesus.
Critical thinking isn’t Christianity’s strong suite.
TBH, you could remove the entire Old Testament and most Christians would be probably be happier. The divide between Judaism and Christianity would sure get worse though. Not that most Christians know they are reading the Torah for the first half of their precious book lmao.
Not Christian anymore but I grew up extremely Roman Catholic and I can answer this.
My priest preached evolution. The idea here being that the concept of Adam and Eve could very well have been some distant ancestor. After all, there had to be, even in evolution, a “first” man and woman, reaching some unknown criticality in the evolutionary process.
Just like the “earth was created in 7 days” bit, when Christians say, but what is a “day” to God?
I don’t follow it anymore but I thought I could shed some light.
I’m not arguing with you (more, your former priest), but if God made man in his own image, it can’t really be said that Adam and Eve is now allowed to be represented by a few multi-celled crawlers in the primordial soup.
Also, he apparently created ALL the land animals AND the people on the sixth day. Pretty weird if we’re now admitting that people were land animals.
only idiot evangelicals believe the literal 6 day creation stuff
God made man in his own image
From a DNA point of view, obviously.
That’s not how it works. Genesis is a myth, a story who puts chronologically an existential truth.
The original sin is original in that it predates us.
yep. bible unequivocally states that “God created all things”. There is zero wiggle room there, unless the original translation of “all” means something less encapsulating than our modern day notion of the term.
OG sin is that of the creator, YHWH aka God, not ours, according to those dusty ass scrolls so many people continue to die over.
EL SHADDAI? MORE LIKE Y’ALL GON’DIE
- jehova
I wonder what next iteration of the Horus myth will overtake Christianity eventually.
I tried an answer there.
and failed.
Conservative US Christians are mad as hell.
LOVE to see it!
catholic != christianEvery catholic is a christian, not every christian is a catholic. The title was about US catholics.But, you can’t deny that US protestants are mad as hell too. That seems to be their default state.
Resentment and disagreement is in their very name, after all. I’m sorry for these people, they always need an enemy to fight to define their own identity.
I’d give it a better than zero percent chance that he’s dug up and put on trial after death
Right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon notably have moved in Catholic circles saying Pope Francis should be curtailed.
Meanwhile, Bannon’s friend Cheeto Jesus gets a pass.
Hopefully a ban on backing political candidates… That shit is toxic
Yiannopoulos, who touts a traditionalist form of Catholicism, has been telling anyone who will listen to him, to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.”
…what kind of self-hating fuckery is this?
He’s also pro-child abuse. No idea why anyone gives him a platform.
