BY TOM CURRY
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York said Sunday that Pope Francis believes the Catholic Church needs to examine why some states are choosing to legalize civil unions of gay couples. But the pontiff has not expressed approval of such unions, Dolan said.
“He didn't come right out and say he was for them,” Dolan said in an exclusive interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. What the pope has said, according to Dolan, is that church leaders need to “look into it and see the reasons that have driven them…. Rather than quickly condemn them… let's just ask the questions as to why that has appealed to certain people…."
Dolan said he himself believes that marriage between one man and one woman is “not something that's just a religious, sacramental concern…it's also the building block of society and culture. So it belongs to culture. And if we water down that sacred meaning of marriage in any way, I worry that not only the church would suffer, I worry that culture and society would.”
On the pontiff’s views on capitalism and disparities of wealth, Dolan said it was “terrible hyperbole” for commentator Rush Limbaugh to refer to Pope Francis as a Marxist.
The Catholic Church is “always concerned about excesses on the left, which is collectivism, socialism, communism, and excesses on the right, which is unfettered, cut-throat capitalism,” Dolan said. “Somewhere in between is the via media, which will come to a fair, equitable, just, economic system.”
Pope John Paul II, having lived under a Communist regime in Poland, “was a bit more sensitive to the excesses on the left. Francis, he's a bit more sensitive about the excesses to the right.” As Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis lived under right-wing regimes in Argentina for much of his life.
1 comment:
The Catholic CHurch does not "study" murder, rape etc. There is nothing to study; further, as regards the State legislating on legalized sodomic arrangements, the |State has no moral authority to do so; and the Church has been very clear on this, Further, Popes have been very clear as to the moral and civil authority of the State: c.f. Libertas, Immortale Dei by Leo XIII for starters.
Any justification of these evil arrangements could then be argued in favour of a "delicate" review of abortion. It all comes down to: is sodomy intrinsically evil? If so, case closed. Sacred Scripture is clear: one cannot do evil that good may come of it.
A priest once said a few years ago, that the \Freemaons may never get a Pope to go out on the loggia and say:"gay is good, go to it..." But they could induce a Pope to cause such confusion - through either inactivity, pastoral error, that Catholics no longer know what to think.
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