For those of you who know/care, the current temporal drama accompanying the millennia of spiritual warfare undertaken by the Church Militant has been regarding (mostly) European bishops seeking to change Church moral teaching on homosexual unions, the ability of women to become priests, and perceived persecution of the radical Traditionalists conducting Mass in Latin. Tradicals are known for spending all their time online criticizing the 1960s Vatican II Council and the post-conciliar Papacies, our beloved Pope Francis in particular.
This Mad Rad Trad attention has been focused of late on the happenings of the German Synodal Path, where a majority of German bishops have engaged in the direction of outright schism. They desire to establish a permanent council of mixed laity and consecrated to lead the Church, effectively abolishing the hierarchy. Additionally, for years now, individual bishops and priests in Western Europe have been openly blessing gay unions in flagrantly heretical fashion. To date, the Pope has largely kept discussions of these happenings internal and avoided taking actions that could/would lead to the Church losing communion with many thousands of followers, hundreds of priests in an area of the world with few new vocations, and millions or billions in real estate of priceless, timeless Churches.
This week, the Pope has once again reaffirmed Orthodox teaching and chastised the blasphemous bishops and heretical harpies assaulting Holy Mother Church. Some highlights:
Link to the previous letter: LETTER OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS TO THE PILGRIM PEOPLE ... https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/LETTER-OF-THE-HOLY-FATHER-FRANCIS-to-Church-in-Germany.pdf
"I sought not to find “salvation” in constantly evolving committees, nor to persist in self-absorbed dialogues rehashing the same themes" really sums up Pope Francis's handling of both the RadsTrads and the heretics neatly. As much as I'm concerned about the direction of the world and the Church, these insufferable and divisive fundies expend all their energy into goading the Pope to repeat himself ad nauseam and view anything less than immediate excommunication as evidence that the Pope will change doctrine (if Catholicism is true, this is literally impossible as moral teaching is protected by the Holy Spirit) or at minimum sympathizes with the progressives.
TLDR: still Catholic, opposes change in teaching while promoting change in handling of hotbutton issues. and love you all very much. Pray for me, and pray for the Church.
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I have a hard time believing there's a massive amount of extremely catholic gays who are upset that they can't get married by the Catholic church.
There may be gays who are upset that they can't use beautiful catholic churches for their wedding ceremonies, but I doubt it's some sort of religious conviction.
To them I would say, suck it up and just get married at some Unitarian church or whatever.
That's just my gut feeling on the issue.
I'd be more open to women being priests than gays getting married in the church, honestly. That's just my personal opinion, though..
tldr: the germans are literal heretics and gay marriages done in catholic churches aren't valid.
edit:
also, this shit irks me, because the catholic church has for so long been against birth control and abortion.
Like - only unprotected s*x between married people for the purposes of procreation. The meme, but unironically.
And now we're going to go from that to marrying cute twinks and letting people do whatever they want?
Sorry, but no.
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In the early Church baptisms were performed in the nude, meaning that there were female deacons (at minimum?) to allow for modesty to be maintained.
I'm personally more hopeful that the discipline of permanent chastity is removed to allow for married priests like the Eastern Catholics/Orthodox have maintained; vocations are so low that if nothing changes many Churches will someday have to function without the Eucharist at all in their weekly services. Looking like the most realistic future is either a Church with few priests or a Church with several married priests each with full time jobs taking part time pastoral duties.
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Yeah, that seems like a reasonable change.
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Permanent deacons have been allowed to be married for decades now, where is the flood of permanent deacons, who could fulfill many of the functions of the missing priests? There are some, but the idea that altering this would have much effect on priesthood in the Latin church seems like wishful thinking.
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It won't make the problem go away (I didn't claim it would) but measures need to be taken proactively to address the issue. The financial and personal requirements currently placed on priests are simply untenable in the modern world/culture. As poverty continue to decrease in the third world, it won't be enough to poach priests from Africa. Particularly in places like Europe and South America and the Philippines with many of the Church buildings having stood for hundreds of years, I would much rather retain the infrastructure than see dioceses consolidate and sell everything off to be turned into night clubs and catering venues.
And fwiw the permanent diaconate is only slightly beneath replacement level in vocations, which is more than can be said of priests and consecrated virgin orders.
https://www.usccb.org/news/2022/annual-survey-provides-snapshot-permanent-diaconate-united-states
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The Church's views on chastity have always been a bit outlandish IMO. If you go back to Augustine you see that the early Church Father's believed that sexual desire was inherently sinful and that marriage was more of a containment mechanism (not the best summary but I think it captures the general idea). Quite frankly, I think it's pretty clear that early Christians, chief among them Paul the Apostle, believed that the Second Coming was going to happen fairly soon, if not in their lifetimes then in the near future. In their minds, s*x was soon to be an outmoded artifact of a fallen world, so it was to be tolerated for the time being within the confines of sacramental marriage, at best.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is effectively consequentialist, which has generally been rejected within Catholic thought (see G.E. Anscombe). If vocational chastity is a moral necessity within Catholic doctrine, then its abrogation in pursuit of a desired ends is not morally permissible.
Quite frankly, I think @ResquantoSyndrome makes a good point. This measure might help somewhat, but it is probably a bandaid, at best. I say this as someone who shares your opinion up until recently (that's not to say that I no longer agree, but I don't think it will reverse the vocational shortage).
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I'd always been under the impression that the move towards permanent chastity was both a reaction to abuses within the priesthood and also an effort to limit the ability of family dynasties controlling the Church as much or more than being intended as an affirmation of sexual moral theology. If it is/was ever a moral necessity then I'm not sure why St. Peter was selected or the Church recognizes as licit Eastern/former Anglican priests?
If Church infrastructure is to be saved it will be necessary to do something to revitalize vocations, so mostly I just see sitting on our hands as the worst possible outcome. Modern cultural have made the current priesthood very unappealing to enter and there's room to adapt the model to our current epoch shift without changing the fundamentals.
I'm curious, what would you propose the Church do? I'm open to alternatives/that I may be wrong.
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I'm starting to wonder if there are even that many gays who want to get married period.
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Statistically there are not, https://news.gallup.com/poll/389555/lgbt-americans-married-same-s*x-spouse-steady.aspx it's about 1-in-10. We changed marriage laws for 1% of the population assuming it wasn't really just to normalize
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I think we wanted it cos straggots had it. If we could do it all again I'd be even more dramatic about it.
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I think it's kind of rare to be against the idea of women being priests, the usual line is just that it's literally impossible.
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