An invitation from Pope Francis to lunch is raising a lot of questions on social media, among them, "Is the Pope Catholic?" It used to be a joke. But now there are more people asking that lately because they want to know what's happening with him and the Church.
What sparked the question were the reports that the Pope had invited a transgender group to lunch at the Vatican.
NEW - Pope Francis hosts transgender group for Vatican luncheon.pic.twitter.com/bQ5UdJgSae
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 22, 2023
A group of transgender individuals from the Italian beach town of Torvaianica had lunch with Pope Francis on the occasion of the Church's World Day of the Poor https://t.co/q9A9RfOepS pic.twitter.com/i4gQTAcT8f
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 21, 2023
The group was invited to visit on World Day of the Poor and was part of a bigger group of about 1,000 people who were poor or homeless. Members of the group, which includes sex workers, have become friends with the pope and have had monthly VIP visits with him since the pandemic when they were unable to work, and the Vatican helped them out. The pope gives them medicine, money, and things like shampoo.
Now, while the Church is always going to be reaching out to help the poor and the troubled, it should be doing so in the context of still condemning sin and upholding truth. People wondered if this amounted to an endorsement.
Last month, the Vatican raised even more questions by issuing a document stating transgender people could be baptized and could be godparents.
However, in a somewhat ambiguous clarification, the guidance specifies that in order for individuals with gender-identity afflictions to be baptized, it must not cause "scandal" or "disorientation."
This same stipulation applied to their eligibility to act as godparents or witness marriages, according to the Vatican.
So how are the clergy and the Catholic people to interpret that? It's understandable that some are looking at this and saying what's going on here?
Father Brian Graebe, a priest with the Archdiocese of New York who holds a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, told Fox News Digital previously that the Vatican's guidance is not contradictory to church teaching, but possibly "deficient."
"There's nothing in the document that contradicts church teachings. My reaction to it when I read it yesterday was that it's deficient. The problem isn't so much in what it says as in what it leaves unsaid," Graebe said.
He continued, "What I was disappointed not to see in the document was affirmation that in the right of baptism itself, whatever name the person has, we call it a Christian name [or] their baptismal name [...] what we must affirm is that the correct biological pronouns are to be used."
But while the document may be "deficient," the Church is still teaching that believing you can just flip your sex isn't the truth: a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and claiming otherwise is wrong. That's what my local parish priest preaches.
It also should be noted that Pope Francis spoke out earlier this year against the "transgender ideology."
Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations,” Francis said in the conversation.
The pope made the comments in a March 10 interview with Argentinian newspaper La Nación — the conversation was translated into English by the Catholic News Agency.
“Why is it dangerous?” he continued. “Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.”
“All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences,” the pope said. “The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”
So there's a seeming tension between words and actions that needs to be addressed further.
I think the same battle that we see outside the Church is going on inside the Church for the heart of the Church. I think that's why St. John Paul II hung on for so long. He fought Communism and chaos for so many years. And that was important for the Church to be a bastion against things that degrade life. And the concern about Francis is how left he might be. And he says things that make you wonder, like this comment about Israel:
Pope Francis on Israel’s assault on Gaza: “This is not war, it is terrorism”. pic.twitter.com/8RLkfdINOy
— Thomas Fazi (@battleforeurope) November 23, 2023
As we reported a couple of weeks ago, Pope Francis removed conservative Bishop Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, who had been challenging him for some time.
I'm kind of curious as to what my priest is going to say this Sunday about this latest news.
