On The Vatican’s Alleged Move To Accept Gays
Although a submission that has been voted down by just concluded Synod of Catholic Bishops at the Vatican in Rome, the alleged move, by a po...
http://www.africaeagle.com/2014/11/on-vaticans-alleged-move-to-accept-gays.html
Although a submission that has been voted down by just concluded Synod of Catholic Bishops at the Vatican in Rome, the alleged move, by a powerful section of that synod of bishops, to push for the acceptance of gay unions, unmarried couples and divorced persons into the fold of practising Catholics, represents not only a venting discontent over traditional Catholic moral values, but also a growing trend in the imposition of conventional family lifestyle and sex culture on the rest of the world.
According to the preliminary report of the college of bishops, issued recently midway through the two-week synod, the church, among other things, was called upon to welcome and accept gays unmarried couples and those who have divorced and remarried without annulling their first marriage.
Even when the document stated that this proposal did not change the doctrine or teachings of the church, and would be subjected to serious revision and debate in the course of the synod, the excitement caused by the media reportage of the gay relationship issues, were misleading pieces of information that seemed deliberately put together to set an agenda. Aided by the subjective tendencies of a section of the press, gullible and inadequately informed watchers of the events unfolding at the Vatican had come to think that the church was embarking on a reformation!
This situation, which gay rights groups tend to view as a revolution, calls for concern and demands robust elucidation for proper assimilation by the many who see the Vatican as a global moral voice. The concern has become necessary not only because it touches on personal liberties and rights, but also because any decision on gay and family rights issues has a boomerang effect on the cultural values of different peoples and societies.
Firstly, it is a truism that tension over doctrinal values exists between the traditional orthodox moral teachings of the Church and the conventional worldviews of a fast-evolving modern society that is individualistic and relativistic. A fall-out of this tension, as reports in the States showed, were alleged incidents of gay couples denied communion, gay parishioners evicted from choirs and parish councils, and gay teachers and professors dismissed from schools.
For instance, a bishop in a diocese in the States recently commissioned university dons in his diocese to carry out research on the reason behind declining membership in his diocese. The result of the research suggested that the church’s rigid position on same sex unions and on divorce, which barred remarried faithful from the reception of the Communion, were stated as reasons for poor church attendance. In economic terms, this means decreased revenue for the church, whose dwindling finances in recent times have been compounded by incessant settlement of sex-scandal litigation expenses.
It may seem therefore, that the search for comparative advantage and increased market share in what has become the religion industry, and other socio-cultural situations of this kind tend to propel some synodal submissions.
Notwithstanding, the fact that the church is deepening its thinking on human dignity, as seen in the openness to this moral minority within its fold, is a salutary pastoral approach. The submission that the language and temperament in relation to the gay people and other minorities be conciliatory, and the emphasis that irrespective of the person’s sexual orientation, he or she possesses a dignity and an intrinsic worth, are laudable. They tend to further the church’s view of the dignity of the human person. This position might have been informed by the thinking that, the right to whatever sexual preference an individual chooses is a matter of individual liberty. It could also have drawn its strength from the scientific position that sexual preferences may not be unnatural, when viewed from the psycho-medical standpoint of brain hemispheric dissonance that leads to seemingly deviant behaviours.
However, the difficulty to logically sustain either of these views without engaging in fruitless air-splitting, is observed in the majority stand of the synod: that same sex relationships and sex same unions are fundamentally disordered sexual orientation, both from the anthropological standpoint, which gears the union towards a production, and from the cultural standpoint.
But it is also a fact of social history that the dominance of non-religious and atheistic philosophies on today’s socio-cultural order is inimical to the values of many non-western and traditional societies. That the gay acceptance submission is coming from Europe speaks of a cultural challenge facing the church there. One did not hear any Bishop of Africa, Asia, Latin America and bishops at the Vatican defending that position. It is one thing to have a cultural challenge in the management of a doctrine, it is another to alter that doctrine by universalizing the cultural problem.
The African culture, by its ethos, worldviews, and communalist moral consciousness, advances the contrariness of homosexuality to natural tendencies, in the same manner the western culture denounces polygamous associations on the basis of the contestable Judeo-Christian western notion of equality. While the African culture retains the idea of man’s ontological basis of freedom as given, it sees in homosexuality a potential danger to the optimum realization of this freedom, in the same way other abuse of freedom offends society’s sensibilities. Besides, it is also wary of how the logic of freedom could be employed in future to justify some forms of weird practices such as bestialism. Thus, the need to save the family system and salvage Christian marriage becomes imperative for any institution with a moral voice.
The flipside of this is that African bishops and influential priests who have been getting grants for their projects from European and American church agencies will soon begin to meet stumbling blocks. If this is the case, the African church must love its community and grow it without becoming rootless appendages to the injurious philosophies and secularist theologies of other cultures.
Source: UK Guardian
According to the preliminary report of the college of bishops, issued recently midway through the two-week synod, the church, among other things, was called upon to welcome and accept gays unmarried couples and those who have divorced and remarried without annulling their first marriage.
Even when the document stated that this proposal did not change the doctrine or teachings of the church, and would be subjected to serious revision and debate in the course of the synod, the excitement caused by the media reportage of the gay relationship issues, were misleading pieces of information that seemed deliberately put together to set an agenda. Aided by the subjective tendencies of a section of the press, gullible and inadequately informed watchers of the events unfolding at the Vatican had come to think that the church was embarking on a reformation!
This situation, which gay rights groups tend to view as a revolution, calls for concern and demands robust elucidation for proper assimilation by the many who see the Vatican as a global moral voice. The concern has become necessary not only because it touches on personal liberties and rights, but also because any decision on gay and family rights issues has a boomerang effect on the cultural values of different peoples and societies.
Firstly, it is a truism that tension over doctrinal values exists between the traditional orthodox moral teachings of the Church and the conventional worldviews of a fast-evolving modern society that is individualistic and relativistic. A fall-out of this tension, as reports in the States showed, were alleged incidents of gay couples denied communion, gay parishioners evicted from choirs and parish councils, and gay teachers and professors dismissed from schools.
For instance, a bishop in a diocese in the States recently commissioned university dons in his diocese to carry out research on the reason behind declining membership in his diocese. The result of the research suggested that the church’s rigid position on same sex unions and on divorce, which barred remarried faithful from the reception of the Communion, were stated as reasons for poor church attendance. In economic terms, this means decreased revenue for the church, whose dwindling finances in recent times have been compounded by incessant settlement of sex-scandal litigation expenses.
It may seem therefore, that the search for comparative advantage and increased market share in what has become the religion industry, and other socio-cultural situations of this kind tend to propel some synodal submissions.
Notwithstanding, the fact that the church is deepening its thinking on human dignity, as seen in the openness to this moral minority within its fold, is a salutary pastoral approach. The submission that the language and temperament in relation to the gay people and other minorities be conciliatory, and the emphasis that irrespective of the person’s sexual orientation, he or she possesses a dignity and an intrinsic worth, are laudable. They tend to further the church’s view of the dignity of the human person. This position might have been informed by the thinking that, the right to whatever sexual preference an individual chooses is a matter of individual liberty. It could also have drawn its strength from the scientific position that sexual preferences may not be unnatural, when viewed from the psycho-medical standpoint of brain hemispheric dissonance that leads to seemingly deviant behaviours.
However, the difficulty to logically sustain either of these views without engaging in fruitless air-splitting, is observed in the majority stand of the synod: that same sex relationships and sex same unions are fundamentally disordered sexual orientation, both from the anthropological standpoint, which gears the union towards a production, and from the cultural standpoint.
But it is also a fact of social history that the dominance of non-religious and atheistic philosophies on today’s socio-cultural order is inimical to the values of many non-western and traditional societies. That the gay acceptance submission is coming from Europe speaks of a cultural challenge facing the church there. One did not hear any Bishop of Africa, Asia, Latin America and bishops at the Vatican defending that position. It is one thing to have a cultural challenge in the management of a doctrine, it is another to alter that doctrine by universalizing the cultural problem.
The African culture, by its ethos, worldviews, and communalist moral consciousness, advances the contrariness of homosexuality to natural tendencies, in the same manner the western culture denounces polygamous associations on the basis of the contestable Judeo-Christian western notion of equality. While the African culture retains the idea of man’s ontological basis of freedom as given, it sees in homosexuality a potential danger to the optimum realization of this freedom, in the same way other abuse of freedom offends society’s sensibilities. Besides, it is also wary of how the logic of freedom could be employed in future to justify some forms of weird practices such as bestialism. Thus, the need to save the family system and salvage Christian marriage becomes imperative for any institution with a moral voice.
The flipside of this is that African bishops and influential priests who have been getting grants for their projects from European and American church agencies will soon begin to meet stumbling blocks. If this is the case, the African church must love its community and grow it without becoming rootless appendages to the injurious philosophies and secularist theologies of other cultures.
Source: UK Guardian
