When presenting the "Relatio post disceptationem" this Monday, Cardinal Erdo was asked by reporters about the scandalous paragraphs on homosexuality, homosexual unions, and the raising of children by homosexual "couples", that are in most aspects a 180-turn away from the 2,000-year-old permanent doctrine and practice of the Church, as taught even more strongly in the last two pontificates. Instead of explaining them, he refused to do so, and told Abp. Bruno Forte, the extreme liberal theologian who is acting as his assistant, to explain the passage, since Forte had authored it.
“The Church does not believe that the term 'family' can be used to refer both to a union between a man and a woman that is open to procreation and same-sex union. Having said this, it seems obvious to me that humans have different experiences have rights that must all be protected. The issue here therefore, is not equating the two in all senses, including in terminological terms.“Naturally, this does not mean that we should rule out looking for a way to describe the rights of people living in same-sex unions. It is a question – I think – of being civilized [Rorate note: the Italian original is even more forceful, "a matter of civilization"] and respecting people’s dignity.” This is according to Mgr. Bruno Forte, the Synod’s Special Secretary, who commented on the relatio post disceptationem, the summary of the Synod’s first week of discussions, presented today by Cardinal Peter Erdő. His comment was in response to a question on legislation that legally protects cohabiting gay couples and was made during the daily briefing with journalists.The Hungarian cardinal who gave the floor to Mgr. Forte because, he said, “he who wrote the text must know what it is talking about,” added that “the subject came up in the free discussions too and some said it seems to have been missed out in these paragraphs, although at one point there is a clearer reference to the fact that there are also disordered forms of cohabitation” and the circuli minores – the language groups the bishops have been split into – “are to discuss the issue this week and “later on”. The groups will also be making amendments to the text presented today.On this note, Mgr. Forte answered a question about whether the reference to the “seed of the Word” and “elements of sanctification and of truth” that are also to be “found outside” traditional marriage also applies to gay cohabitation and common-law marriages. “I think the document intends to find positive aspects wherever these are to be found and they do exist of course. Rejecting something is easy but recognizing and giving value to all that is positive, even when dealing with these kinds of experiences, I think is an exercise in intellectual honesty and spiritual charity.”
"Elements of sanctification and truth" can be used to justify anything. Hell can be said to have elements of sanctification, even if not for those already there, since it promotes a quest for better behavior. It certainly contains quite a great amount of painful truth, since it truly exists... Yet that has never led the Church to promote seeking eternity in hell. Likewise, all the greatest crimes and aberrations of human behavior can contain some, even if infinitesimal, amount, of "elements of sanctification and truth," what the perpetrators thought was the accomplishment of a good deed (even if only for them). And one will have a hard time finding a lie that is "100% lie" - all lies, and in particular the more efficacious and durable ones, have quite an abundance of "elements of truth". Yet the Church has never felt it her duty, until this fateful Monday, to favor the "acceptance" and "value" of untruth because it contains "elements of sanctification and truth."
It was not a thousand years ago, but in 2005, that the Pope, Benedict XVI at the time, made clear that pseudo-marriage is not "sanctifying", but licentious, and that there were no "rights" to be protected, but an "expression of anarchic freedom":
[T]he various forms of the erosion of marriage, such as free unions and "trial marriage", and even pseudo-marriages between people of the same sex, are instead an expression of anarchic freedom that are wrongly made to pass as true human liberation. This pseudo-freedom is based on a trivialization of the body, which inevitably entails the trivialization of the person. Its premise is that the human being can do to himself or herself whatever he or she likes: thus, the body becomes a secondary thing that can be manipulated, from the human point of view, and used as one likes. Licentiousness, which passes for the discovery of the body and its value, is actually a dualism that makes the body despicable, placing it, so to speak, outside the person's authentic being and dignity.The truth about marriage and the family, deeply rooted in the truth about the human being, has been actuated in the history of salvation, at whose heart lie the words: "God loves his people". The biblical revelation, in fact, is first and foremost the expression of a history of love, the history of God's Covenant with mankind.Consequently, God could take the history of love and of the union of a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage as a symbol of salvation history. The inexpressible fact, the mystery of God's love for men and women, receives its linguistic form from the vocabulary of marriage and the family, both positive and negative: indeed, God's drawing close to his people is presented in the language of spousal love, whereas Israel's infidelity, its idolatry, is designated as adultery and prostitution.In the New Testament God radicalizes his love to the point that he himself becomes, in his Son, flesh of our flesh, a true man. In this way, God's union with mankind acquired its supreme, irreversible form.Thus, the blue-print of human love is also definitely set out, that reciprocal "yes" which cannot be revoked: it does not alienate men and women but sets them free from the different forms of alienation in history in order to restore them to the truth of creation.The sacramental quality that marriage assumes in Christ, therefore, means that the gift of creation has been raised to the grace of redemption. Christ's grace is not an external addition to human nature, it does not do violence to men and women but sets them free and restores them, precisely by raising them above their own limitations. And just as the Incarnation of the Son of God reveals its true meaning in the Cross, so genuine human love is self-giving and cannot exist if it seeks to detach itself from the Cross.
The passage on homosexuality and homosexual "couples" of the Synod relatio is just so scandalous and absurdly opposed to everything the Church has always taught that its sole rational purpose must have been taking attention away from the main artificial debate, on communion for individuals in public state of mortal sin for adulterous relationships without valid confession (the so-called "communion for remarried divorcees"). Most interventions in the Synod Hall this Monday have reportedly been against this repulsive passage.
