Key points from Pope Francis’s major new document on family issues
08.04.16
(Family law / Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity / Tradition, Culture, Religion)
After two years of high-level meetings to discuss some of the most contentious and most personal issues in the Catholic church — including gay marriage, cohabitation and divorce — Pope Francis published a major teaching on Friday about the Catholic family.
Don’t have time to read the whole 256-page document? Take the time to read these six key excerpts, which together sum up Francis’s conclusions.
1. The Church defines the ideal relationship as a heterosexual marriage. But Francis writes that other loving relationships can have value too.
“Christian marriage, as a reflection of the union between Christ and his Church, is fully realized in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful and exclusive love, who belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life, and are consecrated by the sacrament, which grants them the grace to become a domestic church and a leaven of new life for society. Some forms of union radically contradict this ideal, while others realize it in at least a partial and analogous way. The Synod Fathers stated that the Church does not disregard the constructive elements in those situations which do not yet or no longer correspond to her teaching on marriage.”
2. That being said, Francis makes it totally clear in this document that he won’t support gay marriage.
“During the Synod, we discussed the situation of families whose members include persons who experience same-sex attraction, a situation not easy either for parents or for children. We would like before all else to reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence…. In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, ‘as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.’”
