The Church has “frequently wounded the LGBT community through judgmentalism and exclusion,” Washington
Cardinal Robert McElroy claimed in a June 20 homily at the homosexual
conference Outreach, held at the Jesuits’ Georgetown University.
He pointed to "two developments during the pontificate of Leo XIV".
The
first was a remark Leo XIV made during his trip to Africa in April,
when he said that “the unity or division in the church should not
revolve around sexual matters.”
Cardinal McElroy commented: “Too
often both in magisterial statements and on the popular level, sexual
sins have been condemned with an ardor that effectively places them in
the eyes of many believers as the core moral obligation of Christians.”
Leo
XIV instead pointed “to the comparative importance of economic justice,
war and peace, immigration and racism as key elements of the Christian
moral life.”
The second development cited by McElroy was the
publication of the report of synod's Study Group 9 in May and its
“pathbreaking” anthropology.
McElroy explained: “Pastoral
practice [...] proceeds from the conviction that the concrete situations
in which people find themselves are constitutive dimensions of how
doctrine should be formed in the light of the kerygma.”
He argued
that this represents the greatest contribution Pope Francis made to the
Church: “to reform our conception of pastoral theology and see it as a
core element of coming to understand the […] formation of Catholic
teaching.”
The cardinal even repeated his central claim:
“Pastoral practice is not the understanding of how to apply an already
formed and often reified set of principles to concrete situations. It
proceeds from the conviction that the concrete situations in which
people find themselves are constitutive dimensions of how doctrine
should be formed in the light of the kerygma.”
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