A long time after she was barred from pastoral work by the Vatican, Pope Francis has despatched a letter of due to an American nun who held providers for LGBT folks, through which she questioned some teachings of the Church.
Because the late Nineteen Seventies, Sister Jeannine Gramick ran workshops for LGBT Catholics, through which she taught each the Catholic Church’s place on homosexuality and extra liberal Christian doctrines. These workshops caught the eye of the Vatican, and in 1999 the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Religion barred her from ministry, as she was selling, of their phrases, “ambiguous positions on homosexuality and explicitly criticised paperwork of the Church’s Magisterium on this difficulty.”
The Congregation’s assertion was written by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and described homosexuality as an “intrinsic evil.”
Gramick ceased her LGBT ministry and joined one other non secular order. Ratzinger went on to turn into Pontiff – Pope Benedict XVI – and was considered a staunch conservative. His successor, Pope Francis, has a extra liberal fame.
In a letter to Gramick despatched final month and printed by the Jesuit journal ‘America’ on Friday, Francis thanked the nun for her “closeness, compassion, and tenderness.” The pontiff acknowledged that Gramick had skilled “struggling” throughout her 50 years of ministry, however didn’t elaborate additional on the subject.
Talking to the Washington Submit, Gramick stated that she was “overjoyed” by the letter, and expressed hope that it might mark a “turning level” within the Church’s place on homosexuality, which at current considers it a sin. Whereas the Congregation for the Doctrine of Religion not too long ago dominated that homosexual folks might obtain blessings, the Church won’t bless same-sex unions, because it considers them too near marriage, and defines marriage strictly a male-female partnership.
Francis has stood by this view, stating in 2020 that “gay folks have a proper to be in a household,” however ought to go for civil partnerships as a substitute of marriage. Two years earlier, he really helpful that homosexual clergymen ought to keep out of the Church, saying “It’s higher for them to go away the ministry or the consecrated life moderately than to dwell a double life.”
Nevertheless, the pontiff has made a number of notable statements in help of the LGBT neighborhood. Again in 2013 he declared that “if an individual is homosexual and seeks God and has good will, who am I to evaluate?” Final summer season he praised the work of Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and homosexual rights campaigner who as soon as ministered alongside Gramick, saying it “displays the closeness of God.” The earlier 12 months he despatched a letter of help to an Argentinian nun operating a house for transgender ladies, declaring that the transgender are the “lepers of at the moment.”
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