UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
NCR Editorial Staff | May. 29, 2015
EDITORIAL
To help them prepare for this fall’s Synod of Bishops on the family, the presidents of the bishops’ conferences of Germany, Switzerland and France gathered with biblical scholars and theologians to discuss and clarify “the issues at the heart of the current debates on marriage and family,” including “theology of love” and of sexuality as a “language of God and a gift precious to God.” Let’s hope that among the scholars they called upon were theologians like Creighton University’s Michael G. Lawler and Todd A. Salzman. And let’s hope they took a hard look at the results of the Irish referendum on marriage.
Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was correct when he called the overwhelming support for marriage equality in Ireland a “reality check” for the church — it most certainly is, which is why the world’s bishops should be discussing it.
But Martin got it wrong when he said the outcome was part of a social revolution. The overwhelming public support for a broader, more inclusive acceptance of marriage equality has certainly come swiftly, but is more evolution than revolution, which is Lawler and Salzman’s point.
If Cardinal Walter Kasper is correct when he says that Pope Francis “wants a listening magisterium,” let’s hope that Francis, too, is listening to what the Catholics of Ireland are telling the church. They have made manifest in casting ballots what sociologists have documented in research and what Catholic families have experienced in the lives of their children, aunts and uncles, parents and even grandparents: “That God can be,” to quote Jamie Manson, “as fully present in the relationships of same-sex couples as God can be in opposite-sex couples.”
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