The Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, has said that while some recent comments about homosexuality attributed to Pope Francis are 'orthodox teaching,' and also 'beautiful,' the pope's reported remarks could require clarification.
The remarks were a response to comments attributed to the pope and made to Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean victim of sexual abuser Fr Fernando Karadima, who told the Spanish newspaper El Pais on Friday that Pope Francis told him that it did not matter that he was gay.
Cruz recalled: 'He told me "Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like that and he loves you like that and I do not care. The Pope loves you as you are, you have to be happy with who you are."'
Cardinal Dolan endorsed the pope's affirmation, saying: 'Jesus would have said that, and so would I. That's conservative, traditional, Catholic, orthodox teaching. The Catechism insists on that.'
'While any sexual expression outside of a man and woman in marriage is contrary to God's purpose, so is not treating anyone, including a gay person, with anything less than dignity and respect,' Dolan added, in comments on May 22 during his weekly radio show on Sirius XM's The Catholic Channel and reported by the Catholic News Agency (CNA).
'What he says is beautiful, don't you think?' Dolan asked.
But he noted that while he had no reason to doubt Cruz's account, the pope's reported remarks were 'third hand: what the pope said to him, he said to the press, so one would want to get a clarification'.
He said it was a case of 'a little bit of "wait and see"' adding 'let's find out exactly what the Holy Father said'.
Yet Dolan was surely correct when he implied that while the pope's reported comments had been misinterpreted as some dramatic change in Church teaching, in fact they represent nothing new.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that 'deep-seated' homosexual inclination is 'objectively disordered,' but that people with homosexual tendencies 'must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.'
As the theologian and priest Fr Thomas Petri told CNA: 'Of course God loves all people. This is his defining characteristic: God is love.'
'But he does not love sin, indeed he cannot love sin because sin is not only opposed to God but also opposed to the true good and happiness to which he calls every human person.
'So while [God] may love every person, he does not love the things we do that separate us from him and harm our dignity as his children,' added Petri, academic dean of the Dominican-run Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.
'Inasmuch as all of us has proclivities and disordered desires in our lives, we must be always be vigilant against temptation and repent when we fall,' Petri told CNA.
'The relationship of God's almighty will and his infinite goodness to the disorder, sin, violence, and evil we experience in this life is question the Catechism of the Catholic Church says is "as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious,"' he said.
He added: 'What we know, is that nothing escapes the providence of God, even disorders, pathologies, sin, and evil. In a very poignant section on providence and the scandal of evil, the Catechism points to the fact that God has created the world and humanity in a state of journeying. Nothing is perfect and so disorders exist.'
Many may be offended by the implied likening of homosexuality to a 'disorder'. But in other words, the teaching of the Catholic Church remains the same, and it can be summed up as against the sin, not the sinner. And yes, that comes down to whether or not homosexual people have sex.
