UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph
By Damian Thompson
Last updated: July 29th, 2013
Three million. That’s more than the entire population of Albania. Or Jamaica. The crowds of young people who greeted Pope Francis on Rio’s Copacabana beach yesterday demonstrate his extraordinary appeal; Benedict XVI couldn’t have attracted such jaw-dropping numbers. How many were devout participants in World Youth Day is another question: one poll claimed that 65 per cent disagreed with Catholic teaching on birth control. But if Francis was attracting “cafeteria Catholics” or non-believers, then he’d surely say: so much the better.
The spectacle of a Pope visiting a muddy Brazilian slum in order to scold the rich has delighted most Catholics. Some traditionalists are less easily won over, however. They distrust a humility that’s expressed in soundbites and photo-ops. Benedict, they point out, is just as humble a man. When Francis said last week that the Catholic Church was “perhaps too cold, too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas,” they take it personally. Some of them will not be pleased by the Pope’s statement, on the plane back from Brazil, that “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?”
Actually, I don’t think the Pope intended to criticise his predecessor, and he is not changing Catholic teaching on the sinfulness of homosexual acts. But there’s no doubt that he’s presenting it in a more relaxed manner, and he’s moving the Church away from its recent position – formulated amid panic over sex abuse – that celibate gay men pose too much of a risk to be ordained. That was a ridiculous and insulting stance which, if it were enforced retrospectively, would leave parishes all over the world without a priest.
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