Pope Francis’ new morality reflects a historic change

That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question.

Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”

As judgment was thought to be part of the papal job description, traditional Catholics were startled at what the new pope had volunteered.

Now the Holy Father has apparently fleshed out what he meant. According to a childhood victim of a pedophile priest in Chile, Juan Carlos Cruz, a homosexual to whom the pope apologized, Francis said: “God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope does love you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.”

What makes this remarkable is that the catechism of the Catholic Church, based on the Old and New Testament and tradition, has always taught that homosexuality is a moral disorder, a proclivity toward sexual relations that are unnatural and immoral.

The idea that God is responsible for homosexual orientations, that the pope and the Catholic Church are fine with men being attracted to one another, and that those so oriented should be happy with it, appears, on its face, to be heresy.

It implies that what Catholics regarded for centuries as moral truth was wrong, or that moral truth has evolved and must be made to conform to modernity.

And if what Cruz reports is accurate, the pope’s position is close to Hillary Clinton’s. In 2016, at a New York fundraiser, Clinton recited her infamous litany of sins common to the “basket of deplorables” backing Donald Trump. Said Clinton, they are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

Up until December 1973, homosexuality itself was listed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.

The new morality we hear from the pope and Clinton reflects a historic change in the moral thinking of the West. For the belief that homosexuality is normal and natural, and not only acceptable but even praiseworthy, has carried the day.

Legislatures and courts have written this “truth” into law.

Consider the views of Cardinal Gerhard Muller as to what is behind the drive to have “homophobia” regarded as a mental disorder: “Homophobia (is) an invention and an instrument of the totalitarian dominance over the thoughts of others. The homo-movement is lacking scientific arguments, which is why it created an ideology which wants to dominate by creating its own reality.”

In short, cultural Marxists and their progressive allies have taken an ideological assertion — homosexuality is normal, natural and moral — without any historical, biological or scientific basis, and asserted it as truth, established it as law, and demanded that we accept and act upon this truth, or face the wrath of the regime.

Since the Stonewall Riot of 1969, homosexual relationships have gone from being seen as indecent and immoral, to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being on the same plane as traditional marriage, to being a constitutional right.

And if you do not accept the new morality, you are a deplorable bigot.

The truths being jettisoned built the greatest civilization known to man. Will the invented truths of our new egalitarianism survive the arrival of the new barbarians? It’s not looking all that good right now.