It’s nice to hear the pope say this, and he ought to be commended for it, but let’s not shower him with praise just yet. First, his distinction between the Church and its members is misleading, and obscures the role of dogmas. The Church is a constellation of the people and the institutions that make it up. It’s individuals who decide and act. It wasn’t “the Church” that used indulgences to pick the pockets of believers, it was Catholics. It wasn’t “the Church” that burned heretics at the stake, it was Catholics. It wasn’t “the Church” that supported fascism in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovakia, it was Catholics. And it’s not “the Church” that preaches the sinfulness of condom use in AIDS-ravaged Africa, it’s Catholics, including Pope Francis. But the church is culpable for these crimes insofar as it perpetuates the beliefs that motivate them.
The pope is a good man doing his best to turn an archaic institution around, but there’s no avoiding an ugly truth: Christians condemn gay people not because of what they do but because of who they are, and they do so for purely theological reasons. Millions of Christians offer solidarity and love to LGBT people, but that’s an ethical intuition they bring to their faith from outside it. They do what most decent religious people do: pirouette around the parts of the Bible they find violent or regressive. [...]
The Church’s position on homosexuality illustrates why it’s so important to link ethical claims to the reality of human suffering. Religious people often confuse doctrinal obedience with ethical responsibility, but these are different things. There is no ethical reason to judge a gay person on account of his or her homosexuality. And yet religion gives good people bad reasons to do just that. When Francis said gay people need pastoral care, what he means is that they’re fallen and need spiritual guidance. But that assumes they’re broken or defective. What gay people need is what all people need: love. What Francis offered was judgment masquerading as compassion.
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