ROME, October 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In perfect time to affect the U.S. presidential election, a new film will premier in North America on Sunday that represents in dramatic fashion Pope Francis’s attack on President Trump as “not a Christian” for the President’s building of the border wall. In the documentary, which premiered in Rome today, Pope Francis has made his most clear statements contradicting Catholic Church teaching by calling for homosexual civil unions to be legalized. Speaking of homosexual civil unions, he said “What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered. I stood up for that.”
The film Francesco is a fawning and dramatic treatment of Pope Francis, painting the pontiff as a liberator of humanity pushing on many of the hot-button issues dear to the Democrat left.
It is not the first time Pope Francis has contravened Church teaching in the matter of homosexuality, but it is one of his clearest statements contravening established Church teaching. In 2003, in a document by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and approved and ordered published by Pope St. John Paul II, the Church issued specific guidance on the need to reject homosexual civil union proposals. The document called “Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons,” states that “all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
The Catholic Church teaches, moreover, that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and that respect for homosexuals “cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
Catholic News Agency reported that the film includes the “story of the pontiff encouraging two Italian men in a same-sex relationship to raise their children in their parish church.” Speaking of his pastoral approach in an interview with filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, the Pope said, “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”
LifeSite has contacted the Vatican Press Office and several Cardinals for comment but has not yet received responses.
Remarks attributed to Pope Francis (and, not denied by the Vatican) in support of homosexual civil unions have caused grave scandal to the faithful.
Please SIGN this urgent petition which asks Pope Francis to clarify and rectify these heterodox and scandalous remarks on homosexual civil unions, and which will be delivered both to the Vatican and to the Papal Nuncio of the United States (the Pope's official representative in the U.S.).
As the last guarantor of the Faith, the Pope should clarify and rectify these remarks, which go against the perennial teaching of the Church, even including the teaching of his living predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
"What we have to create is a law of civil coexistence [meaning civil union law, for homosexuals]...," Pope Francis is reported to have remarked, in what is arguably his clearest statement of public support for a practice morally prohibited by official Catholic Church teaching.
In fact, the Church has been crystal clear in Her opposition to homosexual unions.
Just in 2003, Pope Saint John Paul II approved a document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, titled 'Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons' and written by Cardinal Ratzinger (now, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), which concludes with the following:
"The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself."
It could not be more clear: the Church is calling people to repentance, not to be left to indulge in grave sin.
Since becoming public, several senior prelates as well as other notable Catholic figures have voiced their opposition to these remarks attributed to the Pontiff.
Cardinal Raymond Burke stated: "It is a source of deepest sadness and pressing pastoral concern that the private opinions reported with so much emphasis by the press and attributed to Pope Francis do not correspond to the constant teaching of the Church, as it is expressed in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition."
Cardinal Gerhard Müller commented: "Where there is tension between the plain and obvious Word of God and the infallible interpretation on the one hand, and private expressions of opinion even by the highest church authorities on the other, the principle always applies: in dubio pro DEO [When in doubt, be in favor of God]."
And, Catholic theologian and apologist Scott Hahn, without directly quoting Pope Francis, shared on Facebook the 'Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,' published by the CDF in 1986, with the statement: "Holy Father, respectfully and humbly, I beg to differ... if that is indeed what you said. In any case, please clarify and rectify your statement, especially in view of the official teaching of our Lord through the magisterium of His Church."
But, the silence from the Vatican has been deafening, with no clarification forthcoming.
We must, therefore, ask the Pope for clarification in this serious matter.
Please SIGN and SHARE this petition which asks Pope Francis to clarify and rectify remarks attributed to him in support of homosexual civil unions.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
'Cdl. Burke: Pope’s homosexual civil union remarks ‘contrary’ to Scripture, Tradition' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/cardinal-burke-on-popes-homosexual-civil-union-remarks-contrary-to-the-teaching-of-sacred-scripture-and-sacred-tradition
'Cardinal says Catholics ‘can and should’ disagree with Pope’s ‘opinion’ on gay civil unions' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/cdl.mueller-popes-words-on-gay-civil-unions-purely-private-expression-of-opinion-which-every-catholic-can-and-should-freely-contradict
'Archbishop Vigano, Bishops Tobin and Strickland respond to Pope’s approval of homosexual civil unions' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/archbishop-vigano-and-bishops-tobin-strickland-respond-to-popes-approval-of-homosexual-civil-unions
'Pope’s comments on gay civil unions cause shockwaves around the world' - https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/deepest-sadness-cardinal-burke-condemns-pope-franciss-remarks-supporting-civil-unions
While some may be surprised to see Pope Francis advocating for homosexual civil unions when such a position contradicts perennial Church teaching, the Pope’s move comes as no surprise to those who have closely followed him on this issue:
- Pope Francis has promoted the notoriously pro-homosexual Jesuit Fr. James Martin – who was made a Vatican consultant during this pontificate and a speaker at the World Meeting of Families in Ireland and met with him personally in an audience. Fr. Martin has stated that Pope Francis has gone out of his way to appoint “gay-friendly” bishops and cardinals in the Catholic Church.
- In July 2018, Pope Francis sent a three-page letter “blessing” and endorsing a Catholic ethics conference co-organized by Jesuit Father James Keenan, a public promoter of same-sex “marriage.” The conference featured many feminist and pro-LGBT speakers.
- In March 2018, a French priest announced in a televised interview that Pope Francis approved of his blessing of homosexual couples.
- In February, one of the Pope’s top nine advisor cardinals suggested that spiritual encouragement of homosexual couples should be undertaken and blessings for homosexual couples should not be ruled out.
- In a book-length interview in September 2017, Pope Francis signaled support for legal recognition of same-sex civil unions. “Let us call things by their names,” he said. “Matrimony is between a man and a woman. This is the precise term. Let us call the same-sex union a ‘civil union.’”
- On October 2, 2016, Pope Francis referred to a woman who underwent a sex-change operation as a “man.” He referred to her as having “married” another woman and admitted to inviting them to and receiving them at the Vatican in 2015, describing the couple as “happy.” Clarifying his use of pronouns, the pope said, “He that was her but is he.”
- Despite the avalanche of evidence of harm to the Church from the Pope’s “who am I to judge” remark on his first plane interview in 2013, he repeated the line in June 2016 while misrepresenting the Catechism on homosexuality.
- In 2014, Pope Francis appointed Bishop Blase Cupich as Archbishop of Chicago despite his reputation for telling priests not to join 40 Days for Life. After he demonstrated his dissent from Catholic teaching on homosexuality, saying homosexual couples should be given Holy Communion, Cupich was, nevertheless, named a cardinal.
- When the United States nuncio had pro-family hero Kim Davis meet with Pope Francis at the nunciature during his USA papal visit, Davis was refused permission to take photos of the meeting. When the media asked the Vatican about the meeting they first refused to confirm it, and after some time said that “the only real audience granted by the Pope at the nunciature (embassy) was with one of his former students and his family.” The Pope’s former student, Yayo Grassi, was there with his sister, mother, and his homosexual partner. They took not only photos but also video in which Pope Francis can be seen embracing Grassi and his homosexual partner.
- In May 2014, Pope Francis concelebrated Mass with and kissed the hand of a leading homosexual activist priest campaigning for changes in the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.
- Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the archbishop emeritus of Brussels, was a personal appointment by Pope Francis to the Synods of Bishops on the family in 2014 and 2015. In addition to wearing rainbow liturgical vestments and being caught on tape concealing clergy homosexual sex abuse, Danneels said in 2013 of the passage of gay “marriage”: “I think it’s a positive development that states are free to open up civil marriage for gays if they want.”
In a now-famous 2016 in-flight press conference, Pope Francis showed his willingness to engage in political interference in the U.S. electoral process by commenting during the Presidential primaries that Trump was “not a Christian” because he was for building the border wall. In that same in-flight press conference in 2016, the Pope was asked to comment on same-sex union legislation going on in Italy, to which he replied, “The Pope doesn’t get mixed up in Italian politics … the pope is for everybody and he can’t insert himself in the specific internal politics of a country.”
