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 John-Henry Westen / LifeSiteNews

ROME, May 21, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis’ alleged infelicitous counsel to a gay man, if not retracted, risks slowly killing the same-sex attracted by affirming them to death.  

According to multiple reports, a gay man who visited Pope Francis at the Vatican last week is alleging the Pope told him, “God made you gay.” The allegation comes from Juan Carlos Cruz, one of the child victims of sexual abuse by Chilean clergy. The comment has quickly coiled around the world.

Such a strong remark, from such a seat of moral and spiritual authority, would surely tighten the already strong grip of LGBT ideology.  

In this alleged comment, the Jesuit Pontiff made a giant leap from his already confounding, impenetrable, “Who am I to judge?” suggesting to the world that the Church is treading down a path to justifying LGBT identity and activity as fully normal. Such a path would be impossible for the Church of Christ.

The Vatican press office's Cristina Ravenda told LifeSiteNews, “The Vatican does not comment on private conversations of the Pope.” Given the seriousness, we would expect Pope Francis to personally correct the record with haste if Cruz got the quote wrong.

But unfortunately, Cruz’s claim is not far-fetched.  

Over the course of his pontificate, Pope Francis has given indications that he is not concerned with addressing homosexual activity as inherently disordered and intrinsically evil.  Quite the contrary: Not long ago he signalled support for legal recognition of same-sex unions.  He has welcomed a former male student and his boyfriend to the Vatican’s U.S. Embassy. And a French priest recently said in a televised interview that Pope Francis approved of his blessing of homosexual couples.          

According to Catholic philosopher Dr. Josef Seifert, the Pope’s apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, could be used to overturn Catholic teaching against contracepted sex and homosexuality.

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The Pope's alleged remark was the top story on the Drudge Report on Monday.

The souls of roughly two percent of the world’s population are now precariously balanced on the tip of the cupola atop St. Peter’s Basilica, waiting to see if the Church will save them through the telling of hard truths, or condemn them through affirmation.  

The Pope’s words seem to belong to a new form of liberation theology––gay liberation theology––through which those who experience same-sex attraction are affirmed in their impulses, rather than encouraged to conform their lives to the Gospel.    

More significantly, the embrace of a harmful self-identity as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ in the core of their beings is not being rejected by St. Peter’s successor.  Instead, if Cruz’s report holds up, we have a Pope who now simply asserts: “God made you gay.”

The Pontiff’s words are unsupported by the magisterium of the Church.

He is presenting a gospel foreign to Catholic ears.  Even to many same-sex attracted Catholics like me, it is not only foreign; it rings wholly untrue.  

Many of us who experience same-sex attraction and remain chaste are troubled by the Pope’s departure from both Church teaching and natural law, through which we have freedom and life.   In seeking conjugal, complementary marriage rather than anti-conjugal, anti-complementary mono-gendered relationships, we seek nothing more than to fit in with the entire universe, to be part of the wonderful ecosystem of humanity and all of nature. Non-conjugal, non-complementary sexual relationships are a synthetic lifestyle, at odds with nature and the cosmos.

In 2013, the premiere LGBT publication, The Advocate, named Pope Francis “Person of the Year,” for asking, “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with goodwill, who am I to judge?”  

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The Advocate editor’s explanation of their choice reveals the grave danger to which Pope Francis’ problematic question has exposed the Church:

The most influential person of 2013 doesn't come from our ongoing legal conflict but instead from our spiritual one — successes from which are harder to define. There has not been any vote cast or ruling issued, and still a significant and unprecedented shift took place this year in how LGBT people are considered by one of the world's largest faith communities.

Pope Francis is leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics all over the world. There are three times as many Catholics in the world than there are citizens in the United States. Like it or not, what he says makes a difference. Sure, we all know Catholics who fudge on the religion's rules about morality. There's a lot of disagreement, about the role of women, about contraception, and more. But none of that should lead us to underestimate any pope's capacity for persuading hearts and minds in opening to LGBT people, and not only in the U.S. but globally.

The purveyors of LGBT ideology are grateful for this Pope, and have looked to him since 2013 to do their work for them, to knock down the remaining walls which have prevented the infiltration of their ideology into the Church.  The article continues:

The remaining holdouts for LGBT acceptance in religion, the ones who block progress in the work left to do, will more likely be persuaded by a figure they know. In the same way that President Obama transformed politics with his evolution on LGBT civil rights, a change from the pope could have a lasting effect on religion.

They despised a beloved saint, John Paul II, while he was Pope as they did Pope Benedict XVI.  But the LGBT world clearly loves the man who currently occupies the chair of St. Peter. 

Pope Francis's stark change in rhetoric from his two predecessors — both who were at one time or another among The Advocate's annual Phobie Awards — makes what he's done in 2013 all the more daring. First there's Pope John Paul II, who gay rights activists protested during a highly publicized visit to the United States in 1987 because of what had become known as the “Rat Letter” — an unprecedented damning of homosexuality as “intrinsically evil.” It was written by one of his cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI. Since 1978, one of those two men had commanded the influence of the Vatican — until this year.

The Advocate has already happily reported the Pope’s audacious untruth, “God made you gay.”  He may well again be chosen as their ‘Person of the Year’ in 2018.  

The LGBT world applauded Pope Francis’ recruitment of fellow Jesuit, pro-LGBT Fr. James Martin as a communications consultant to the Holy See’s Secretariat for Communications.     

If the Pope’s alleged words to Juan Carlos Cruz––the victim of clergy child abuse––are confirmed to be true, the Pope will have abandoned the world’s same-sex attracted, leaving them adrift in the world.  

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Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children's rights activist.  He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs.  Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.