As someone who has long labored in the service of the Catholic Church’s teachings on fraught sexual expression topics, I think I understand Pope Leo XIV’s recent remarks on Catholic sexual morality in response to a reporter’s question about a German bishop’s proposed same-sex couple blessings. On a recent in-flight press conference,
the pope said:
We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.1
I understand because the world often reduces Catholicism to its sexual morality teachings, with no understanding of their origins or their relationship to everything else in Catholic life. And outside of these contexts, onlookers understandably find them incomprehensible or even harmful. They further focus on “the rules about sex” to the exclusion of everything else the faith contains, whether about justice, equality, freedom, or the very nature of Christian love. It’s important to push back on this.
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