There was a flurry of correspondence between the tireless LGBTQ+ activist Fr James Martin and Pope Francis on Saturday 27January.
Fr Martin’s whole ministry is bound up by his desire to have the Catholic understanding of homosexuality changed.
The correspondence followed an interview Pope Francis gave to Associated Press in which the Pope emphasised that homosexuality was not a crime.
Fr Martin, an American Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, immediately wrote to the Pope asking for clarification, and was at once favoured with a reply.
The correspondence turned out to be interesting for a wider audience because it brought to the surface the underlying issues that drive the culture wars over sexuality.
During the interview with AP, Pope Francis had imagined a conversation in which while remarking that being gay was not a “crime”, someone might offer the objection that “being gay was a sin”, to which the pope replied: “it’s also a sin to lack charity to one another”.
In being asked to clarity his views by Fr Martin, he wrote the following in his explicatory letter:
“When I said it is a sin, I was simply referring to Catholic moral teaching, which says that every sexual act outside of marriage is a sin. Of course, one must also consider the circumstances, which may decrease or eliminate fault.”
And these two statements together have created something of a stir. On the one hand Pope Francis has commendably been re-stating Catholic ethical teaching by saying that every sexual act outside marriage is a sin. On the other hand, however, he has, somewhat ambiguously, drawn in another idea which when linked to the public discussion about homosexual love, may work to undermine Catholic teaching.
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