UNITED STATES
The New York Times
Ross Douthat
The cycle is familiar: A pope says something about a controversial issue that doesn’t fit the media’s semi-informed preconceptions about Roman Catholic teaching, a firestorm of coverage follows, and then better-informed observers are left to pick up the pieces and explain that no, actually, the pope is just reasserting an idea — an openness to Darwinian evolution, the possibility that nonbelievers might go to heaven, pick your controversy — that the church already accepted or believed or allowed to be considered.
In the case of Pope Francis’s comments on homosexuality on the plane back from a wildly successful World Youth Day in Brazil, though, I have a little more sympathy than usual for the media reaction. Here’s what the pontiff said, per the Catholic News Service, in response to a question about sex scandals and a so-called “gay lobby” within the Vatican and the Roman Curia:
… Pope Francis said it was important to “distinguish between a person who is gay and someone who makes a gay lobby,” he said. “A gay lobby isn’t good.”
“A gay person who is seeking God, who is of good will — well, who am I to judge him?” the pope said. “The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well. It says one must not marginalize these persons, they must be integrated into society. The problem isn’t this (homosexual) orientation — we must be like brothers and sisters. The problem is something else, the problem is lobbying either for this orientation or a political lobby or a Masonic lobby.”
Now it’s certainly true, as a host of Catholic writers quickly pointed out, that this doesn’t depart from official church teaching on human sexuality, and indeed invokes the language of the Catechism (commissioned by John Paul II and overseen by Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI) to make its point. Which, means, in turn, that a lot of the more breathless coverage has exaggerated the significance of the pope’s words, and overhyped the gap between what he’s saying and what his predecessors might have said.
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