Pope Francis calls for flexibility, patience as he opens talks on church teaching

[MADem]

1. I smell movement on ..... BIRTH CONTROL....!!!!

I mean, really....no one can think that it's just an accident of fate that Catholic families have shrunk from seven, ten, twelve kids to .... two, maybe three or four, tops in the last half century or so just because...?

It's the easiest subject to overcome, I suspect, because, like it or not, everybody IS, in actual fact, doing it.

And as for the impossible, things are always impossible before they become possible:

But he asked them to arrive early so that they could spend time discussing one of Francis’ signature themes: shifting the church’s approach on controversial topics like divorce and remarriage, cohabitation, gay marriage and contraception.

Those issues will also be the focus of two larger and longer meetings of bishops at the Vatican this fall and in 2015.

“The pope has opened a dialogue, he’s not decided anything yet and now he’ll let us discuss,” Cardinal Walter Kasper, a German theologian who is a favorite of Francis, told Reuters on Thursday.

Kasper said the talks were not about changing doctrine or watering down traditional marriage — “that’s not possible,” he said. But “it’s a question of how to apply (church teaching to) the concrete, difficult, complex situation.”