By Lisa Bourne. Pope Francis has appointed radically liberal, pro-homosexual Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe as a consultor for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. . .

Father Radcliffe, an Englishman, author and speaker, was Master of the Dominican order from 1992 to 2001, and is an outspoken proponent of homosexuality.

“We must accompany [gay people] as they discern what this means, letting our images be stretched open,” he said in a 2006 religious education lecture in Los Angeles. “This means watching ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ reading gay novels, living with our gay friends and listening with them as they listen to the Lord.”

In 2005, as the Vatican deliberated the admission of men with homosexual tendencies to study for the priesthood in the wake of the Church sex abuse scandal, Father Radcliffe said that homosexuality should not bar men from the priesthood, and rather, those who oppose it should be banned.

As a contributor to the 2013 Anglican Pilling Report on human sexual ethics Father Radcliffe said of homosexuality:

“How does all of this bear on the question of gay sexuality? We cannot begin with the question of whether it is permitted or forbidden! We must ask what it means, and how far it is Eucharistic. Certainly it can be generous, vulnerable, tender, mutual and non-violent. So in many ways, I would think that it can be expressive of Christ’s self-gift. We can also see how it can be expressive of mutual fidelity, a covenantal relationship in which two people bind themselves to each other for ever.
Father Radcliffe often celebrated Mass for the U.K. dissident group Soho Masses Pastoral Council (now renamed the LGBT Catholics Westminster Pastoral Council).” (Read more from “Pope Appoints Radical Pro-Homosexual to Important Vatican Position; Conservative Catholics Call it an “Absolutely Shocking Papal Appointment”” HERE)

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Pope’s Pronouncements Making Trouble for GOP Catholics

By Ben Schreckinger. Catholic Republicans are developing a pope problem. Earlier this month, Francis recognized Palestinian statehood. This summer, he’s going to issue an encyclical condemning environmental degradation. And in September, just as the GOP primary race heats up, Francis will travel to Washington to address Congress on climate change.

Francis may be popular with the general public, but key Republican primary constituencies — hawks, climate-change skeptics and religious conservatives, including some Catholics, are wary of the pope’s progressivism. Some, pronouncing themselves “Republicans first and Catholics second,” even say they would look askance at a candidate perceived to hew too closely to the bishop of Rome. This internal conflict flips a familiar script, in which Democrats like John Kerry and Joe Biden were labeled “cafeteria Catholics” when their stances on social issues like abortion and gay marriage differed from those of the church.

“In northwest Iowa, we are discussing this a great deal, and sometimes it’s hard for us to reconcile the pronouncements we read from the Holy Father with our conservative principles,” said Sam Clovis, a Catholic and political activist who’s run for U.S. Senate and state treasurer in Iowa.

Jeb Bush — who praised the pontiff in a commencement speech at Liberty University this month — could lose out in the Iowa caucus, said Clovis. “It’s going to cause a lot of problems for Jeb Bush, because Republicans are simply not going to take him seriously,” he said.

Bush declined to address whether his admiration for the pope might affect how religious conservatives view him. In his speech at Liberty he said, “I cannot think of any more subversive moral idea ever loosed on the world than ‘the last shall be first, and the first last.’ (Read more from “Pope’s Pronouncements Making Trouble for GOP Catholics” HERE)

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Homosexual Marriage Will Split the Catholic Church

By Damian Thompson. Homosexuality as an issue is a greater threat to the Catholic Church worldwide than the sex abuse scandals. Here’s why . . .

• The Magisterium of the Church has always condemned homosexual acts, though recently Rome has emphasised that the orientation itself is not sinful. Critics say that’s a bit like saying you can be left-handed so long as you don’t write with your left hand, but there you go.

• Many liberal bishops, however, have changed their minds on gay issues. First they said homosexuality was ‘a matter for the confessional’, which I’ve always thought was a slippery evasion, but civil unions were unthinkable. Now they say that civil unions are ‘acceptable’ – I’m quoting HE Cormac Card. Murphy O’Connor, former leader of the Church in England and Wales and said to be an intimate of the Pope, though he would no doubt deny it with his trademark aw-shucks modesty. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is part of the ‘greatest evil’ in our country, the breakdown of the family. That’s Cormac again. It is, I think, possible to oppose same-sex marriage on moral grounds without being convinced that it leads to family breakdown. But, as the great sociologist James Davison Hunter pointed out in his 1991 book Culture Wars, mainstream churches have rather given up on denouncing sin on the grounds that it imperils your immortal soul. That doesn’t play well on telly. Instead they’ll reach for a humanitarian argument – abortion, for example, causes depression in women who’ve had one. Or, in this case, gay marriage destroys families.

• In the West, practising Catholics – let alone lapsed ones – are strikingly more gay-friendly than they were even 10 years ago. To quote Pew Research, ‘among churchgoing Catholics of all ages – that is, those who attend Mass at least weekly – roughly twice as many say homosexuality should be accepted (60 per cent) as say it should be discouraged (31 per cent)’. Admittedly, practising Catholics have been merrily disregarding Catholic teaching on contraception for years, safe in the knowledge that no one has a clue whether they follow the rules. But – no offence – gay couples in church often stick out a mile. If they’re in a civil union, many priests will refuse to give the Communion – or, alternatively, make a big show of allowing it. So much depends on the parish. Indeed, attitudes towards gays have become an easy way of distinguishing conservative from liberal parishes, and of creating division in the first place.

• Liberal bishops and priests, even some cardinals, are beginning to change their tune on same-sex marriage. Here’s one reaction to Ireland’s gay vote: ‘I appreciate how gay and lesbian men and women feel on this day. That they feel this is something that is enriching the way they live. I think it is a social revolution.’ That was the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, an arch-liberal who wins applause in the Irish media by attacking old-style Catholic prelates (many of whom, conveniently, are deeply compromised by covering up child abuse). He’d ordain Graham Norton if it were not for the fact that, unusually, Norton is a Southern Irish Protestant. Martin followed his comment with some waffle about fresh ways of getting the Church’s message across but – as ever – he’d given the hacks their headline. Actually, though, Martin has a point. Why should the Catholic stance gay marriage be radically different from its attitude towards civil unions? Gay marriage doesn’t exist according to the Church. There are various answers to this but they’re not terribly convincing. . .

• But (see above) Catholics have a Magisterium whose teachings on homosexuality can’t be changed without the Church deciding that it has the authority to scrap them. At which point some traditional Catholics will up sticks to the modern equivalent of Avignon and we’ll have two popes. Or three, if dear Benedict XVI is still alive. (Read more from this story HERE)

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