NEW YORK
The New York Times
Jennifer Finney Boylan
I ONCE had a friend with a boomerang. One day we took it to the Jersey Shore and I watched as he whupped it around. It was beautiful: the young man and the boomerang, the bright sun and the water. Then, late in the day, he tossed it out over the ocean, and the boomerang didn’t come back. For a while we stood together, looking out, wondering whether we might just have lost sight of it. We glanced around nervously, on the off chance that it might yet clock us on the head, returning from a direction we had not anticipated.
I thought of that long-lost boomerang recently, when the Vatican announced that Pope Francis would be visiting New York in September. It will most likely be a one-day visit, including a speech at the United Nations and probably a Mass at Madison Square Garden and a visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
This pope has gotten rave reviews for his supposedly progressive views, although it may be only that he seems progressive when compared to Pope Benedict XVI, the pope whose philosophy, at times, sounded like the pastoral version of “Get off my lawn.” It is hard to imagine a pope being chosen as the Person of the Year by both Time magazine and The Advocate (a leading L.G.B.T. magazine), but Francis was, in 2013. He’s said that evolution and “the notion of creation” were not “inconsistent”; urged the church to help the poor; and asked, “Who am I to judge?” on the issue of gay priests. The best measure of the pope’s liberalness might be that Rick Santorum says he finds him “very difficult to listen to.”
Yet it’s worth remembering that Francis has not actually changed any church doctrine on these issues. And he hasn’t done a thing to walk back Benedict’s egregious comments on transgender people, which suggested that in living our lives openly, we somehow make human dignity “disappear.” Then, this week, Francis praised Slovakian pilgrims for defending the family, in a quote that appeared to give support to a referendum in their country scheduled for today that could ban marriage and adoption for same-sex and transgender couples.
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