Stop Fawning Over Pope Francis at the Expense of Women and Gay Rights

[El_Johns]

67. Just last year Ratzinger said:

VATICAN CITY — The pope pressed his opposition to gay marriage Friday, denouncing what he described as people eschewing their God-given gender identities to suit their sexual choices – and destroying the very "essence of the human creature" in the process.

Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas address to the Vatican bureaucracy, one of his most important speeches of the year. He dedicated it this year to promoting traditional family values in the face of gains by same-sex marriage proponents in the U.S. and Europe and efforts to legalize gay marriage in places like France and Britain.

In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children was an "attack" on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.

"People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being," he said. "They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves."

"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned," he said.

It was the second time in a week that Benedict has taken on the question of gay marriage, which is currently dividing France, and which scored big electoral wins in the United States last month. In his recently released annual peace message, Benedict said gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace. The Vatican went on a similar anti-gay marriage media blitz last month after three U.S. states approved gay marriage by popular vote.

Church teaching holds that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered," though it stresses that gays should be treated with compassion and dignity. As pope and as head of the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog before that, Benedict has been a strong enforcer of that teaching: One of the first major documents released during his pontificate said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't be ordained priests.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/pope-anti-gay-speech_n_2344870.html


Ratzinger spent his entire term as Pope doing the anti-gay schtick, both intra-Church and in public, and it was this official position of the Church that Francis was enforcing during the Argentinian gay marriage vote.

I've seen no evidence that Francis made a career out of being "ardently & viciously" anti-gay. What I've seen is the same quotes you quote, repeated over & over with no context.

If you know where they came from, I invite you to cite the documents & context.

I didn't appreciate the personal attack, btw. I did not attack you personally, I just invited you to expand on your comments.