Pope calls for same sex 'civil union' laws.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This would of course be a backtracking in places like the US and much of Latin America, but in conservative Catholic societies elsewhere in the Global South and even in Italy itself it's a green light for a pretty significant step.

So yeah, this is a big f**king deal even given that the CDF or the Sala Stampa will probably play it down bigly.

ETA: America magazine (a source less given to stirring up controversy around Francis than CNA is) confirms.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This would of course be a backtracking in places like the US and much of Latin America, but in conservative Catholic societies elsewhere in the Global South and even in Italy itself it's a green light for a pretty significant step.

??

I didn't realize Italy already had civil unions. For some reason I thought it was still in the "registered cohabitation" stage.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

TRADCATH TEARS.gif

Bad last few news cycles for radtrad issues between this and the pachamamista landslide in Bolivia.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Ironically, it seems much of the resistance to civil unions among Catholics comes from a consequentialist perspective, i.e. "if we do permit civil unions, it will lead to..." x, y, and z unrelated to civil unions. But from a deontological point of view, why would permitting contracts which confer taxation and asset privileges, visitation rights, custodial rights, etc. be illict? The creation of corporations, trusts, powers of attorney, guardianships, etc. do exactly the same thing and are clearly licit.

Yes. Same sex unions, and why people enter into them are clearly the same as establishing corporations...

It's RI, he's not the sort of poster I expect to prioritize the "human touch" on this sort of issue.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It will be interesting to see if support for Sedevacantism increases significantly.

Much of the Catholic right has cracked the code (as did much of the Catholic left several decades ago) for how to completely reject or relativize the Pope without becoming sedevacantists, so I doubt it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Good. But the peronist pope is still trash

I feel proud that the pope proposing so many socially progressive reforms for the Catholic Church is the first Latin American pope, I can’t understand how most Argentinians I see talking about him don’t feel a much larger sense of pride when he comes on the news, even considering political differences. I mean, it’s basically Argentina changing the world for better in some ways!

The word "Peronist" in "Peronist Pope" goes some way towards explaining this, doesn't it? He has a long and checkered history in Argentinian domestic affairs that somebody on another "side" of Argentinian issues might very reasonably take exception to.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This is a one-off sentence, possibly far out of context, in a documentary that hasn't aired yet. This is not a formal teaching changing any current practice or doctrine of the Church. For better or worse, I think a lot of you are over-hyping this. I say this as somebody who would generally be in favor of civil unions as a "solution" for the Church in this matter.

I was going to write up a big effortpost to discuss what official church teachings are, what possible ways this can be reconciled with it as a prudential judgment (even if very tenuous and seemingly ill-advised), in what circumstances popes can be wrong about stuff, what Pope Francis's possible aims are, etc etc.

Then it was presented to me that "civil unions" is a questionable translation of what he said in Spanish.* And secondly, the sentences in that documentary the Pope is shown saying are spliced together from multiple interviews and weren't actually said in the sequence in which they were presented. If this is in fact fake news, it seems astonishing that it would get this far by simply being taken out of context and mistranslated, but the more digging I do, it really seems to be spliced at least.

*I've heard other sources saying that "civil unions" is a valid interpretation of "convivencia civil" but it seems to be somewhat ambiguous. A simple google search seems to take it to be "civil coexistence" in every context I can find. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have found the context from the second interview from which that sentence was plucked, as it is not from the same interview as the rest of the statement that is being quoted (that should raise some questions at the very least). Perhaps some of the Spanish speakers here could shed some light on whether "convivencia civil" strictly refers to civil unions or if it can have some broader meaning?

I asked a Hispanophone friend and was told that "unión convivencial" and "unión civil" are both terms for civil union in Argentinian law. Presumably Edu can confirm or disconfirm this. My guess given this is that what Francis was doing here was confirming the open secret that this was his position during Argentina's SSM debate in 2009-2010, and saying that he still feels that was the correct approach.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

For those claiming he was misquoted, surely there would be a statement put out by the Holy See clarifying the Pope's position given how much this has blown up. Absent of a clarification, it is fair to assume that it has been interpreted correctly.

It's possible that ambiguity about this serves Francis's longer-term aims for this issue regardless of whether this particular remark was supposed to mean what it's been presented as meaning.

I want you to know
I'm a mirrorball
I'll show you every version of yourself tonight

People who think that Pope Francis doesn't support any kind of legal protection by "the secular arm" for non-marital (including same-sex) partnerships and that this quote couldn't possibly mean what it's being reported as meaning are straining at gnats and are just not familiar with his record. The same, of course, is true of the POPE BLESSES GAY WEDDINGS gun-jumpers and people who think an offhand remark/informal teaching like this represents some sort of paradigm shift absent further developments.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As I said:

It's possible that ambiguity about this serves Francis's longer-term aims for this issue regardless of whether this particular remark was supposed to mean what it's been presented as meaning.

It's obvious that he wants the Church to be in a general sense a less hostile place for LGBT people. It's equally obvious at this point that he doesn't want to (or can't afford to) go through another Amoris Laetitia-esque melodrama over it.

Francis's political position within the Church's central government structures is very weak compared to that of most of his recent predecessors (although it's still stronger than that of many medieval or Revolutionary-era Popes). Of the post-Vatican II Popes only John Paul I was similarly "lonely at the top", and he only lasted a month.