Shock and Horror as Pope Less Awful than Last Pope

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/world/europe/pope-bluntly-faults-churchs-focus-on-gays-and-abortion.html?_r=1&

Seriously though think of all the suffering gay people go through because of bigotry, tending into outright persecution and murder socially and legally in many countries, such as, for instance, majority Catholic Uganda, in which homosexuality is illegal upon pain of death. It is all well and good to speak to the west of how tolerant the Church is now, to plead for less focus on issues that lose the Church so many congregants amongst the first world. But to raise this facade on the one hand, while Cardinals and priests still tout the murderous lie that condoms are worse than (and propagate) AIDS throughout so much of Sub-Saharan Africa, to preach that gay people are tempters, maintaining the perpetual and vile fabrication that they are acting immorally and unnaturally when they move amongst nations where this can and does get innocent people killed.

The Pope can make a massive positive difference in the lives of so many by saying what all good and reasonable people know: the gender of the people you love and the people you are attracted to says nothing at all about your morality; monogamy and its legal codification through marriage is good and bountiful and beautiful for all of us, and condoms totally save lives and help alleviate poverty. It is cruel to feed into that morass of hatred, however minutely, however timidly Francis wishes to do so, however weakly he foists the bulwark of faith against what we all know in our hearts to be true about our gay brothers and sisters. He has the power within his grasp to do so much and he chooses not to, maybe because his own beliefs are wicked, maybe through fear of the political powers within and without his own church; it is not the first time a Pope has sat silent, or added his voice to the perpetration of evil that it is within his power to change. The fact remains that no matter how he flaps his hands, and really anything a Pope has to say about condoms or heretics or gay people should begin and end with an apology, he could do something very good, at no risk to his own life or safety, and instead chooses to either remain silent or to feed meekly into that evil. He's a Pope, a station now bereft of temporal power, and like anyone else whose power lies in his words this is the wickedness he is capable of. And he does it.

-The Rev. Schmitt., FCD.