Reaffirming sinners in their sins…
Francis assures Parents of Sodomites: “God loves your Children as they are”
Once again, Chaos Frank is doing what he does best — he’s making a mess.
Immediately following his General Audience on Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2020, he met briefly with about 40 people affiliated with the Tenda di Gionata (“Jonathan’s Tent”) group, an association founded in 2018 that lobbies for change in the Vatican II Sect so that openly practicing sodomites will be accepted and affirmed in their disordered inclinations.
Now that is a cause Francis can support, and the official newspaper of the Italian Novus Ordo bishops happily reported on the encounter right away. (That’s the same paper, by the way, that just endorsed and defended the quasi-pedophiliac flick Cuties.)
Francis spoke directly with Mara Grassi, the organization’s rainbow-scarfed vice president. Gerard O’Connell reports:
She told the pope that she is the mother of a son who is gay and “who left the church because he did not feel accepted in his diversity.” She explained how, thanks to her son, she changed her way of seeing things and like other persons in the same situation, after being “destabilized at first” on learning of her son’s homosexuality, she has come to see that “we are fortunate parents.”
She said the pope, in response, assured her and the other parents present that “God loves our children because they are all children of God.” And when she requested that the church, too, should change its ways so that no one feels excluded, Francis reassured them saying, “The church loves our children as they are.”
(Gerard O’Connell, “Pope Francis to parents of L.G.B.T. children: ‘God loves your children as they are’”, America, Sep. 17, 2020)
That we are only children of God insofar as we are in the state of sanctifying grace, is an essential truth Francis withheld from Mrs. Grassi: “But since all mortal sins, even those of thought, make men children of wrath [Eph. 2:3] and enemies of God, it is necessary to ask pardon for all of them from God by an open and humble confession” (Council of Trent, Session 13, Ch. 5; Denz. 899; cf. Rom 8:16-17). Minor detail!
Here is a video of the meeting. Needless to say, Hellboy James Martin was ecstatic.
Some background information can be found in this article by Catholic News Agency.
In her report of the encounter for Crux, Vatican journalist Inés San Martín writes:
Mara Grassi, the vice president of the association, and her husband, Agostino Usai, gave the pontiff a booklet called “Lucky parents,” that was translated into Spanish.
The book collects several stories of members of the LGBT community and Catholic Church, both positive and negative. They also gave Francis several letters and petitions from gay and transgender Catholics, as well as a t-shirt with the rainbow colors and a quote from the First Epistle of John [4:18]: “There’s no fear in love.”
…
The mother of four, the eldest of whom is a gay man in his forties, told the Italian daily La Repubblica that she had experienced “very strong emotions” when meeting with the pope, and acknowledged that for many years after she found out her son was gay she was “like a blind person,” and suffered a lot because “Church rules made me think that he was excluded from the love of God. Nobody helped me.”
(Ines San Martin, “Pope holds private meeting with parents of LGBT children”, Crux, Sep. 18, 2020)
Alas, instead of trying to help her son overcome his vice of unnatural impurity, she instead, together with her associates, found a “new way of looking that enabled us to see in [our perverted children] the beauty and love of God.” One thing or another always has to give: Either the sinner will give up his sin, or he will give up his belief that his sin is a sin. In this case, we’re talking about parents of children living a life of sin. Alas, they have decided to give up the idea that their children’s lifestyle is one of grave sin, and now they have “papal” approval of their stance.
Francis has a lot to answer for, but then that’s nothing new. On May 19, 2018, the news broke that the Argentinian apostate had told practicing sodomite Juan Carlos Cruz: “God made you like that” — a heretical blasphemy. Roughly a year later, he told the sodomite atheist Stephen Amos: “It does not matter who you are or how you live your life, you do not lose your dignity.” That’s all he needed to hear to know that he doesn’t have to change a thing — he’s got way too much dignity for having to live a life of faith and chastity!
To tell a practicing sodomite that God loves him just they way he is, is one of the greatest acts of hatred of one’s neighbor one can commit, especially for a cleric who has the care of souls, above all, the Pope — which Francis claims to be! In His words to the prophet Ezechiel, God reveals the seriousness of the matter: “If, when I say to the wicked, Thou shalt surely die: thou declare it not to him, nor speak to him, that he may be converted from his wicked way, and live: the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but I will require his blood at thy hand” (Ez 3:18).
Of course, the question precisely how to deal with an “LGBT person” in one’s family, is another matter. It requires great prudence, patience, trust in God, and genuine charity. It is a heavy cross. But what is definitely not the right approach is to tell the sinner that God loves him just the way he is: “But to God the wicked and his wickedness are hateful alike” (Wis 14:9).
We must be clear that merely experiencing same-sex attraction is not sinful — sin is an act of the will, not a feeling or experience. What is sinful is consenting to it, approving of it, acting on it, and claiming that such attraction is normal, legitimate, or healthy. It’s sinful because sexual attraction exists for sexual acts, and the primary purpose of sexuality is procreation, something that is intrinsically frustrated in unnatural acts.
Unnatural acts are, in the truest sense of the word, a perversion, meaning a turning away from the proper end (the Latin pervertere literally means “to turn to ill effect”). They are an abuse of the faculties God gave to man for the generation of offspring. As one moral theologian put it: “The malice of sodomy consists in the perverted affection towards the wrong sex or in the attraction towards the wrong method of sexual gratification” (Rev. Heribert Jone, Moral Theology [Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1962], n. 230.2; italic and bold print given).
By telling people that God loves homosexuals just the way they are, Francis is affirming them in their perverted lusts and thereby confirming them on the road to hell, which is anything but merciful: “As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 7).
It must be kept in mind that the frequent question of whether homos are “born this way” or not is actually quite irrelevant to the morality of the matter. In many cases it may very well be true that people who find themselves sexually attracted to people of the same sex have felt this way from the beginning of their lives and have done nothing to bring it about. But that doesn’t mean that such attraction to the same sex is not wrong. It is still wrong; it is still disordered; it must still be resisted with the help of divine grace. As long as there is no consent of the will, there is no sin. But the fact remains that sexual attraction to the same sex is an evil. By analogy, someone may have been afflicted with diabetes from birth, without any fault of his own; but this does not mean that diabetes is not a disease, that it need not be treated, or that certain foods or situations need not be avoided in order to prevent the condition from doing harm to body or soul.
Of course the professional Francis defenders and Novus Ordo apologists will probably claim that Francis meant what he said to Grassi and her colleagues “in an orthodox sense” (wink). But the only way to spin something like “God loves sinners the way they are” into an orthodox statement would be to say that God still loves the sinner despite his sin, for He desires his conversion — He truly loves the sinner, meaning He seeks his supernatural good, his eternal happiness, and that can only be accomplished if he turn away from his sins, repent, amend his life, and die in the state of sanctifying grace: “As I live, saith the Lord God, I desire not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way, and live” (Ez 33:11).
But such spin would be to do violence to the natural and obvious sense of the words and is obviously not what Francis was saying. How do we know? For one thing, if that had been his intended message, the Tenda di Gionata would not be waxing ecstatic about the encounter with Francis on its web site. Moreover, ask yourself this question: Would Francis ever say, “God loves you as you are” to, say, someone who is an open racist, or to a rich man who habitually steals from the poor, or to an employer who defrauds his employees? Fat chance! And what about the Mafia? Does God love them, too, “just the way they are”? It is amazing, but for the Mafia, Francis suddenly rediscovers words like “repent”, “convert”, and even “hell”!
It’s odd, isn’t it, that somehow this faux “merciful” approach is always extended only to a very specific selection of sins, usually the kind that pertains to sexual perversion and to other moral failures that Liberals like Francis have a soft spot for — quite in contradiction to what God has revealed:
But now I have written to you, not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother, be a fornicator, or covetous, or a server of idols, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner: with such a one, not so much as to eat. For what have I to do to judge them that are without? Do not you judge them that are within? For them that are without, God will judge. Put away the evil one from among yourselves.
(1 Corinthians 5:11-13)
By contrast, Francis’ position is: “…who am I to judge?”
Quite obviously, he is not a Catholic.
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