Reclaiming Culture

I awoke today with the internet and everything being abuzz with headlines like "Pope welcomes gay community to Church.", or "Pope's words on gay people have Catholics talking." When doing a little more looking into things I noticed that the quote, while healing and nothing less than what I've come to expect from our Pope, it's a bit of a funny bit -- seems the population and explicitly the media was truly unaware of the Church's stand on gay priests or the population at large. What they "really" received was a lesson from Pope Francis straight out of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.


The most humorous piece is that those Catholics that actually have read/attempted to read/or vaguely know their own Church doctrine know that there is nothing that Pope Francis said that is either new or contrary to teaching. Nothing. It IS contrary to what the media portrays religious institutions and people as non-tolerant, mean spirited hate mongers. Thus why the media HAD to report on it with their slant.

Bishop Egan was a little more direct in ensuring that his words weren't twisted. You can find that article here.

What's important to remember and remind everyone is that Christ, Christians and the Church do not hate sinners; we hate the sin. We do not condemn anyone based on sexual preference, or any sin for that matter. What we do condemn is the sin itself and pray for sincere release from that torment whether it be someone elses or ours. If you want hate there are many others that will chastise and promise hell on earth for those sins.

As the world continues to "relearn" what it thought it knew about Christians in general and Catholics specifically, I continue to be very happy with our Pope Francis. The biggest thing that I took away from all of this; even the Highest Church authority should not judge another sinner. It was refreshing to see from the Pope. I look forward to some Fundamentalists taking this lesson to heart.