By John Mack Freeman<\/i><\/p>\n
Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church asserted that marriage was forever and could only exist between a single and a single woman at a synod on family that opened this week. Via Associated Press:<\/a><\/p>\n Francis launched the synod process two years ago by sending out a 39-point questionnaire to bishops, parishes and ordinary Catholic families around the world asking about their understanding of and adherence to church teaching on family matters. Their responses showed a widespread rift between official Catholic teaching and practice, particularly on sex, marriage and homosexuality.<\/p>\n A first meeting of bishops ended last October with no consensus on how to better welcome gays and divorced and civilly remarried Catholics<\/a> in the church. Conservatives insisted that Catholic doctrine is clear and unchanging. Progressives acknowledged the doctrine but sought wiggle room in pastoral practice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Pope and the Catholic Church have been in the news a lot in the last few weeks. After the Pope’s trip to America, it came to light that he had met with anti-gay clerk Kim Davis. Though the details of how that meeting was set-up and what was said remain unclear, it was not the most GLBT-affirming action possible. Additionally, the Vatican fired a mid-level monsignor<\/a> in the Vatican’s doctrine office after he came out as gay to the press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By John Mack Freeman Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church asserted that marriage was forever and could only exist between a single and a single woman at a synod on family that opened this week. Via Associated Press: Francis launched the synod process two years ago by sending out a 39-point questionnaire to bishops, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":2190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,58],"tags":[420,333,101,421],"class_list":["post-2189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carousel","category-glbt-news","tag-catholic-church","tag-pope-francis","tag-same-sex-marriage","tag-synod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}