(LifeSiteNews) — Friends, you are not going to believe this.
In this first extended interview he’s just done with Crux Now, Leo XIV has basically said that the Church’s teaching on sexual morality could change. He actually even went there and implied that he could – in his words – “change the Church’s teaching” on women’s ordination.
Take a listen to what he said first on sexual morality. This is what he says after having been talking about LGBT issues for a while:
People want the Church doctrine to change, want attitudes to change. I think we have to change attitudes before we ever change doctrine.
That’s right, he’s strongly implying – well, he’s saying – that Church teaching could shift, if attitudes change first.
Might that be why we’ve had so much LGBT stuff in Rome lately, from Fr. James Martin to the LGBT pilgrimage? Are they trying to get our “attitudes to change”?
And what do you think the so-called “LGBT Catholics” are hearing when they hear Leo saying such a thing? It’s a very clear invitation and instruction: work to change attitudes, then we can change the teaching. Wow.
And rather than stating such changes were impossible, Leo said he thought it was unlikely that it would happen soon:
I find it highly unlikely, certainly in the immediate future, that the Church’s doctrine in terms of what the Church teaches about sexuality, what the Church teaches about marriage [will change].
Later, instead of stating that the Church’s teaching could not change, he merely said that he thought that it would remain the same:
I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is, and that’s what I have to say about that for right now.
You think it’s going to continue as it is? Aren’t you supposed to be the Pope – the one responsible for making sure that it continues as it is?
Look friends, this is just stunning. Catholic teaching on sexual morality – including the sinfulness of homosexual acts, as well as fornication, adultery and others – aren’t matters of probabilities or personal conjecture, or contingent and waiting to be changed.
They’re definitive, grounded in both the natural law and divine revelation – and so they’re incapable of being changed.
Reason alone tells us that sexual activity outside marriage – and thus, obviously, all sexual activity between two same sex couples – is contrary to the natural law.
This is also and separately a dogma – divinely revealed in Scripture and proposed by the universal ordinary magisterium of the Church.
Vatican I taught that such truths which are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith.
READ: Pope Leo vows to ‘continue’ Francis’s ‘prophetic vision’ for the Church
Female ordination
Leo also talked about the possibility of the ordination of women to the diaconate in similar terms:
What the synod had spoken about specifically was the ordination, perhaps, of women deacons, which has been a question that’s been studied for many years now. There’ve been different commissions appointed by different popes to say, what can we do about this? I think that will continue to be an issue.
Ok, so in the early Church, there was indeed an office of “deaconess” – but everyone knows that these women were not ordained to any sacramental holy order of the diaconate.
But Leo calls even this into question by equating the female diaconate with that of the permanent diaconate established after the Second Vatican Council. He gives a long anecdote about meeting deacons and their wives in Rome before concluding:
[T]here are parts of the world that never really promoted the permanent deaconate, and that itself became a question: Why would we talk about ordaining women to the diaconate if the diaconate itself is not yet properly understood and properly developed and promoted within the church?
He also expressed his willingness for study and debate on the matter to continue, saying he was “certainly willing to continue to listen to people,” and pointing to the study groups in Rome on the subject. “We’ll walk with that and see what comes,” he said.
But do you know what’s even more shocking? Leo said this:
I at the moment don’t have an intention of changing the teaching of the Church on the topic.
Friends, if you say a thing like that, it’s clear what you think. You’re saying you do have the power to “change the teaching of the Church.”
The immutability of dogma
But the teaching of the Church says that this isn’t possible. Can that be changed too?
Vatican I denied that the Pope could change the Church’s teaching or introduce new dogmas. It taught:
For the holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine.
It goes on to say that the purpose of the papacy is to safeguard and preserve the deposit of faith. Not to consider whether the time is right to change it.
Oh, some will say, we’re not talking about changes. This is just a development of dogma.
Come on. That’s what they always say to justify this stuff. And anyway, Leo was pretty clear: he’s the one who was talking about changing Church teaching.
And anyway, that defense is excluded too. There’s a legitimate sense of the development of doctrine, but changing the meanings of dogmas to something totally different isn’t it.
Such an idea has been condemned time and again by the Church.
Pope Pius IX condemned, in the Syllabus of Errors, the idea that divine revelation is “subject to a continual and indefinite progress.”
Vatican I declared that the “meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained” and that “there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.”
That same Council anathematized anyone who says dogma can be assigned “a sense different from that which the Church has understood and understands.”
Pope St Pius X cited all these teachings in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis against Modernism.
In his Oath Against Modernism, he also required clergy to profess that dogma is handed down “in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport.”
This oath also states that the idea “that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously” is a – get this – “heretical misrepresentation.”
READ: Pope Leo says Latin Mass question ‘very complicated’
Grave implications
“Heretical” is a big word. But the truth is clear: homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, marriage is between one man and one woman, and these teachings cannot change.
As I said above, both the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, and the immutability of dogma are the sorts of truths we have to believe with divine and Catholic faith.
The censure attached to the obstinate denial or doubt of such truths is indeed heresy. (Can. 751 of 1983 CIC, Can. 1325 of 1917 CIC)
So, where does that leave us?
The hugely problematic situation of Leo XIV raising hopes for an impossible change in the future.
And claiming the power to change Church teaching, which he certainly does not have.
And… publicly doubting (or even denying) these two sets of truths in a video interview – which, as I said, is heresy.
You know what St. Paul said about those who try to introduce new dogmas, doctrines or Gospels:
If I, or an angel from heaven, preach to you a Gospel different to that which we have preached to you, which you have received: let him be anathema.
Here we go again, guys.
