Catholic and Enjoying It!
…another round of thick, meaty thuds as heads explode over nothing. Here’s the offending and perfectly commonplace and sensible thing he said:
(The Church) must not only ask forgiveness to the gay person who is offended. But she must ask forgiveness to the poor too, to women who are exploited, to children who are exploited for labor. She must ask forgiveness for having blessed so many weapons. The Church must ask forgiveness for not behaving many times — when I say the Church, I mean Christians! The Church is holy, we are sinners! […] We Christians — priests, bishops— we have done this.
I put myself down first as the chief of sinners in this department, a fact that started to be driven home to me several years ago by the good and honest Leah Libresco. It was continued as I watched while serious, committed, and chaste gay Catholics were repeatedly told that their obedience to Christ was not good enough: that their mere temptation was a mark against them. And it was driven home to me again last week when one of the first responses to the slaughter in Orlando was a Super Catholic on my Facebook page searching for some way to see to it that gays could be rounded up and executed by the state instead slaughtered freelance by lunatics. There was no question about them needing to be killed, just about doing it nice and legal. The rationale was that sodomy is a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. When I inquired whether my reader also was eagerly searching for a way to hang, shoot or electrocute the owners of Walmart for denying their workers a just wage, or have Donald Trump subjected to lethal injection for oppressing the alien, the orphan, and the widow I discovered a startling lack of interest in these projects. Only homosexuals attracted this person’s deep desire for bloody vengeance. “If we can’t execute them, then who *can* we execute?” Light years from his mind was any thought that the slaughter in Orlando was something worthy of mercy or pity for the victims. It was untidy. And if gays got the message that they all have it coming, just in a neat and legal way, the thought never crossed his mind that this might be a problem.
So I have no trouble seeing why Francis thinks that many of us owe gay people an apology.
For my part, mea culpa.
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