Pope’s handwritten note clarifies remarks on homosexuality, sin
ROME — Pope Francis has clarified his recent comments about homosexuality and sin, saying he was merely referring to official Catholic moral teaching that teaches that any sexual act outside of marriage is a sin.
And in a note Friday, Francis recalled that even that black-and-white teaching is subject to circumstances that might eliminate the sin altogether.
Francis first made the comments in an interview Tuesday in which he declared that laws criminalizing homosexuality were “unjust” and that “being homosexual is not a crime.”
As he often does, Francis then imagined a conversation with someone who raised the matter of the church’s official teaching, which states that homosexual acts are sinful, or “intrinsically disordered.”
“Fine, but first let’s distinguish between a sin and a crime,” Francis said in the imagined conversation. “It’s also a sin to lack charity with one another.”
His comments calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality were hailed by LGBTQ advocates as a milestone that would help end harassment and violence against LGBTQ persons. But his reference to “sin” raised questions about whether he believed that merely being gay was itself a sin.
The Rev. James Martin, an American Jesuit who runs the U.S.-based Outreach ministry for LGBTQ Catholics, asked Francis for clarification and printed the pope’s handwritten response on the Outreach website late Friday.
In his note, Francis reaffirmed that homosexuality “is not a crime,” and said he spoke out “in order to stress that criminalization is neither good nor just.”
“When I said it is a sin, I was simply referring to Catholic moral teaching, which says that every sexual act outside of marriage is a sin,” Francis wrote in Spanish, underlining the final phrase.
But in a nod to his caseby-case approach to pastoral ministry, Francis noted that even that teaching is subject to consideration of the circumstances, “which may decrease or eliminate fault.”
Holland climate protest:
Hundreds of climate activists blocked one of the main roads into The Hague on Saturday, defying attempts to prevent their protest that have sparked concerns about restrictions on the right to demonstrate in the Netherlands.
The protesters, many waving colored flags with the symbol of environmental group Extinction Rebellion, gathered on a road near the temporary home of the Dutch parliament.
Protesters who ignored police orders to leave were picked up and carried away one by one to waiting buses and driven away.
Last week, six Extinction Rebellion activists were detained by authorities on suspicion of sedition linked to calls to stage the protest.
A judge on Friday upheld an order banning another activist from the area for 90 days. Extinction Rebellion said that he ignored the order and attended the protest. A lawyer for the group said the order was a way of “taking away the right of climate activists to demonstrate.”
Sri Lanka politics: Sri Lanka’s president suspended Parliament until Feb. 8, when he said he would announce a new set of longterm policies to address a range of issues including an unprecedented economic crisis that has engulfed the nation for months.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe issued an extraordinary decree suspending Parliament as of midnight Friday.
The government did not give a clear reason for the move, but Wickremesinghe’s office in a statement said his address to lawmakers next month will announce new policies and laws, which will be implemented until the centenary celebrations of Sri Lanka’s independence in 2048.
Unsustainable debt, a severe balance-of-payment crisis and lingering scars of the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a severe shortage of essentials such as fuel, medicine and food.
Soaring prices triggered massive protests last year that ousted Wickremesinghe’s predecessor, Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Peru elections: Peruvian President Dina Boluarte called on Congress Friday to approve a proposal to move elections forward to late this year, a marked concession from the leader who has been facing daily protests that have left almost 60 people dead.
Boluarte had already expressed support for holding national elections in April 2024, rather than the previously scheduled 2026, but support seems to be growing among lawmakers to move them up to December 2023.
Moving elections to later this year could help the country “get out of this quagmire we’re in,” Boluarte said Friday.
Boluarte, the former vice president, became president on Dec. 7 after her predecessor, Pedro Castillo, was impeached for trying to dissolve Congress.
Castillo was later arrested and detained.
India jets crash: Two Indian air force jets crashed in the central state of Madhya Pradesh on Saturday, killing one pilot, officials said.
The Indian air force said on Twitter the aircraft were on routine operational training mission. One of the three pilots involved sustained fatal injuries, and an inquiry has been ordered to determine the cause of the accident.
Two pilots managed to eject safely, but it is not clear whether the planes collided, Adarsh Katiyar, additional director general of police, told the Press Trust of India news agency.
Columbus Day lawsuit: A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit alleging that the mayor of Philadelphia discriminated against Italian Americans in renaming the city’s Columbus Day holiday to Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
A U.S. District judge ruled a year ago that the plaintiffs, a council member and three Italian American heritage groups, hadn’t been harmed by Mayor Jim Kenney’s executive order, and therefore none of them had standing to sue over the issue.
Judge David Porter, writing for the three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday, said the government “does not violate the Equal Protection Clause every time it affirms or celebrates an ethnicity. Otherwise, Columbus Day itself would arguably have been an equal protection violation — but of course it wasn’t.”
As it stands, “Irish American city employees who wish to celebrate St. Patrick must take a personal day,” and the city doesn’t close for Yom Kippur or give time off for the Lunar New Year, the court said.
The plaintiffs might have a case if the city celebrated every ethnicity but “conspicuously excluded” Italian Americans, but not from selective celebration of particular ethnicities alone, the court said.