Pope Francis Calls Sex Outside Marriage ‘Not the Most Serious Sin’

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

Of course it's not the most serious sin. When has anybody of consequence ever claimed that it is?

The point he's making here is pretty, let's say, pre-#MeToo, and I really don't agree with it, but I get where he's coming from--he's pointing out that Aupetit didn't force himself on anybody and isn't accused of having done anything with minors. An octogenarian Peronist living in Italy not being exactly up-to-the-minute on perceptions of workplace love affairs is not news, and neither is a Catholic prelate teaching the entirely orthodox and traditional position that sexual sins or sexual vices are not in and of themselves uniquely severe.

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

I do think there is something of a problem with how Catholics (in the US at least) talk about sexual sin different than other classes of sins in a way that elevates them to extra super-de-duper mortal sins. I don't think it's helpful towards bringing about the repentance and conversion of those who commit them.

Yes, lots of Catholics do very much act as if sexual sin is a special kind of evil despite the complete lack of any orthodox or traditional theology remotely supporting that position. I'm not surprised that someone primarily familiar with that "style" of Catholic sociopolitical engagement, and completely unfamiliar with actual Catholic theology, would conclude Francis is saying something novel here. Unfortunately, that group includes quite a number of Catholics.

To be clear, it's not so much the substance of what he said but rather the optics and how this will be interpreted by conservative Catholics who are already critical of Francis.

I've seen enough of a pattern from the beginning of his reign to believe there's probably a lot about the Church Francis would be happy to change, but the powers that be wouldn't allow it. Either way, I expect his eventual successor to downplay some of what Francis has been saying the past several years. Hopefully the Vatican will surprise again, though.

Both conservatives within the Church and progressives/liberals outside it have a habit of representing Francis as more liberal than he actually is, each for their own reasons. His successor will probably be more careful to avoid giving that impression, but with each passing consistory the window for a conclave to produce someone who would go all the way back to Benedict-style contra mundum theology and messaging grows narrower (especially since just within the past year or two the most prominent and most widely respected heavy-duty conservative papabile, Cardinal Sarah, has drifted to the far edge of the global Church's current Overton window; then again heavy-duty progressives like Cardinal Marx keep discrediting or sabotaging themselves too...).

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

Didn't Dante rank lust as the lesser of the deadly sins? I don't necessarily agree myself, but this is certainly nothing new and would only be surprising to the perpetually sex-obsessed Americans.

Yes, the Dantescan ranking is lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride, in ascending order of severity.

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

Didn't Dante rank lust as the lesser of the deadly sins? I don't necessarily agree myself, but this is certainly nothing new and would only be surprising to the perpetually sex-obsessed Americans.

Yes, the Dantescan ranking is lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride, in ascending order of severity.

Isn’t treachery last, after pride?

Betrayers are in the deepest circle, yes--the sea of ice surrounding Satan, with Cassius, Brutus, and Judas Iscariot perpetually chewed up in the big guy's three mouths--but since the number of circles doesn't match the number of deadly sins/cardinal vices (nine versus seven), the correspondence between circles and sins gets more abstract and mix-and-match as the Inferno goes on. Technically from the sixth circle (heresy) onward the setup is of Dante's own invention.

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

Dante's work is also fiction, not a chapter of the Bible.

Dante has had an undeniable influence on the way Christians in general and Catholics in particular understand different sins and how they relate to one another, even though his preferred vehicle for expressing his views on that subject was narrative poetry rather than discursive theological argument. There's a Benedict XV encyclical expressly stating that the Commedia is a valid resource for religious education if it's understood on its own terms.

Dante's work is also fiction, not a chapter of the Bible.

Must... resist... urge...

Even from a thoroughgoingly antireligious perspective, much of the Bible is lyric poetry, legal theory, or heavily embellished court history rather than fiction per se.

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

Because we live in dumb world, I'm sure this will be blast all over as "Pope says adultery ok now", which is unfortunate. 

     This is the one thing that worries me about this story. While it is definitely true that sexual sins are not the worst sins one could commit, there are certain folks representing a few different causes who would gladly interpret this as meaning that sexual sins aren't bad. Being charitable to Pope Francis he probably did not intend that understanding at all, but that could easily be warped into the intended meaning in the eyes of the general public.

This would be a valid concern if there wasn't an equally pervasive tendency on the right to act like sexual sin is the only kind of sin worth worrying about, at the expense of all the far more serious sins rooted in greed or pride that they regularly condone.

No, it's a valid concern anyway, in the same way that lynching was a valid concern despite being the object of the OG whataboutery. Someone with PiT's political loyalties and low overall opinion of Pope Francis might not be the best messenger here, but it's difficult to deny that the secular press has a habit of exaggerating Francis's liberalism to advance its own "liberal default worldview".

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

And on a side note, Nathan, I understand the point you were making, but using f**king lynchings as your parallel is an unnecessary rhetorical escalation and just plain gross. You're better than this.

The only reason my mind went to lynching was because, as I said, it's the subject that the term "whataboutery" was coined in reference to. I obviously shouldn't have left open the interpretation that I thought the severity of the problems was similar (which I don't, as I'm sure you trust), and you're right to call me out on that.

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

The back of genuinely liberal (in the sense that, say, the Episcopal Church is liberal) Roman Catholicism was successfully broken by the JP2-Ratzinger CDF in the 80s and 90s, though. The most notorious "liberal" cleric in the US (or at least in the US conservative Catholic imagination), James Martin, is tacitly heterodox on two or three questions specifically related to homosexuality and transgender identity, as opposed to someone like Charles Curran who systematically and publicly rejected Church teaching across the whole issue area of human sexuality. Cardinal Marx is not as liberal as Cardinal Kasper, who was not as liberal as someone like the late Hans Kung. The liberal flank of the Church is still causing problems for "Pope's Catholics" and for the magisterium as an institution, but they're not nearly as far beyond the pale as they were forty or fifty years ago, whereas the conservative/trad flank is only getting more extreme with time. Even when it comes to the liturgy, the sorts of "abuses" people talk about today mostly comprise things like sludgy, mediocre music and laypeople making hand gestures they technically aren't supposed to. Macrame-chasuble hippie Masses are a fading memory and widely acknowledged to have been embarrassing even by people who were proponents of them at the time.

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

The back of genuinely liberal (in the sense that, say, the Episcopal Church is liberal) Roman Catholicism was successfully broken by the JP2-Ratzinger CDF in the 80s and 90s, though. The most notorious "liberal" cleric in the US (or at least in the US conservative Catholic imagination), James Martin, is tacitly heterodox on two or three questions specifically related to homosexuality and transgender identity, as opposed to someone like Charles Curran who systematically and publicly rejected Church teaching across the whole issue area of human sexuality. Cardinal Marx is not as liberal as Cardinal Kasper, who was not as liberal as someone like the late Hans Kung. The liberal flank of the Church is still causing problems for "Pope's Catholics" and for the magisterium as an institution, but they're not nearly as far beyond the pale as they were forty or fifty years ago, whereas the conservative/trad flank is only getting more extreme with time. Even when it comes to the liturgy, the sorts of "abuses" people talk about today mostly comprise things like sludgy, mediocre music and laypeople making hand gestures they technically aren't supposed to. Macrame-chasuble hippie Masses are a fading memory and widely acknowledged to have been embarrassing even by people who were proponents of them at the time.

     I don't think extremity is the most pertinent measure to assess a problem. Look at the Arians vs. the non-Chalcedonians. The Arians were far more extreme in their error, but their episcopal line ultimately died out, whereas the non-Chalcedonians claim some 60 million adherents worldwide today, including the large majority of Christians in several countries. With that in mind, the non-Chalcedonians have done more damage to the global reach of the Church than the Arians ever did.

Have they? The current Catholic position on the non-Chalcedonians is that the...unfortunate events of the mid-fifth century were mostly due to a semantic issue (whether to translate ὑπόστασις into Latin as persona or natura given the respective connotations of those words at the time) that spiraled out of control, and that the resulting lack of communion thus has historical rather than theological causes. Is the Eastern Orthodox position different from this?