Pope Francis: Muddying doctrine, conservatives complain

[eridani]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/22/1254619/-Pope-Francis-I-Muddying-doctrine-conservatives-complain

Rod Dreher at the American Conservative is ALL OVER this. The big exception here is that Dreher is the rare conservative writer who understands that the culture wars are over and that his side lost. Most of his posts tagged "Pope Francis" are clip farms, but the day after Matt Lewis write his "it's the press's fault" essay, Dreher made this jaw-droppingly amazing statement:

A majority of weekly massgoers actually support same-sex marriage. That’s a pretty amazing finding. I would have thought that weekly massgoers were much more supportive of Church teaching than they actually are. The times are changing. It will come as a huge shock to conservative Catholics (and fellow travelers like me) if we discover that JP2 and B16 did not represent the Church’s future, but rather the last gasp of the recoverable unrecoverable past. Thoughts?

The Google doesn't really turn up a lot more on the subject, so let's see what the Times has to say. Ms. Goodstein observes, correctly, that

A poll released last month by Quinnipiac University found that two in three agreed with Francis that the church was too “obsessed” with a few issues.

[Igel]

1. Ultimately the church will be faced with the choice of most churches.

It will either be true to its wallet or to its soul. It will have to fight to survive as an organization, decreeing organizational continuity to be its mission and goal or will have to fight to retain its message. That's really a fight over power and possessions.

For many the fight's over. The message has been not only redefined but the church itself retconned. The current purpose of the church, as seen by some members, has always been the purpose of the church.

This just echoes what happened nearly 2000 years ago and has happened from time to time since then. The organization will continue and will always have had as its mission the new mission, with great expositions as to how a relatively small portion of the historical documents actually were the core and the majority of the documents formed the periphery. We have much better "intellectual" arguments to make this kind of sophistry not only possible but obligatory, at least the first time around.

[cbayer]

2. Conservatives complaining always tends to be a good sign, imo.

Muddying doctrine or moving the church towards the 21st century? I'm hoping for the second.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. On the other hand, you don't get more conservative than venerating '2000 year old' bones

Vatican displays Saint Peter's bones for the first time

The Vatican has publicly unveiled bone fragments purportedly belonging to Saint Peter, reviving the scientific debate and tantalising mystery over whether the relics found in a shoe box truly belong to the first pope.

The nine pieces of bone sat nestled like rings in a jewel box inside a bronze display case on the side of the altar during a mass commemorating the end of the Vatican's year-long celebration of the Christian faith. It was the first time they had ever been exhibited in public.

Pope Francis prayed before the fragments at the start of Sunday's service and clutched the case in his arms for several minutes after his homily.

No pope has ever definitively declared the fragments to belong to the apostle Peter, but Pope Paul VI in 1968 said fragments found in the necropolis under St Peter's Basilica were "identified in a way that we can consider convincing".

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/24/vatican-st-peters-bones-display-pope-francis

If they're going to make something old prominent, I'd much rather it were bones than attitudes.

[dimbear]

5. Once forensic science advances to the point that we can tell whether those bones died upside down,

that'll at least be a good clue. Also a plus would be if they're human.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

4. I have said for years

That if the Catholic Church had spent as much time and energy on the sin of avarice as it has on the sin of lust, we would all be better off.