The Synod Of Bishops 2014

The 2014 Synod of Bishops, a meeting that had uncovered deep divisions within the Catholic church, will continue next year when the world will find out if those divisions will be bridged and if so, how.  An article published by a decidedly non-religious medium, Reuters, summarized the event. [1]

While one can dream of the perfect person and a perfect family in a perfect world, the dream cannot be translated into reality for nobody is perfect and therefore no family is perfect at a place that is no longer the Garden of Eden.  How the Church plans to deal with those who have sinned but cannot  "go and sin no more" is a challenge because a sinner will keep on sinning without the grace of God.

Certainly, no one really expects the Church to expand her definition of family to include unmarried heterosexual couples with kids and married homosexual couples with adopted children, and to welcome divorced men living with their pretty, young girlfriends, leaving their wives without husbands and their children fatherless and to permit a Bishop to go around sprinkling "dykes" on their "bikes" at a gay parade with Holy Water.

It will be interesting to see how far the Church under this pope will go in accepting those existing outside of the scope of a traditional Catholic family [2] without judging them.  If indeed this pope is willing to embrace everyone with open arms, Heaven would look very different in his imagination than in Cardinal Burke's.



[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/23/what-the-catholic-synod-that-discussed-divorced-lgbt-believers-did-and-didnt-do/
[2] This entry is not complete without without analyzing Jesus' family (see http://www.gotquestions.org/Joseph-and-Mary.html).  Jesus' family was not traditional.  The Son of God was conceived by the Holy Spirit (a one-of-a-kind of conception that is not  equivalent to a sperm-bank pregnancy or an in vitro  fertilization) before Jesus had a father (Joseph and Mary were betrothed when Joseph was asked to become the father of Jesus, the "husband" of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by angel Gabriel), but it could  be said that Jesus was conceived by God the Father, and therefore He had a Father before He was conceived.  Technically, Jesus had two fathers.  A boy from a good Catholic family does not have two fathers (notwithstanding the Lord's prayer that begins with "Our Father" and other prayers to God the Father), let alone parents who never have sexual relations with each other.  Joseph and Mary never had sexual relations before the birth of Jesus (it was not likely that the Blessed Virgin Mary had sex with Joseph when She was carrying the Son of God in Her womb) and presumably none after they were married (they were supposedly married) since Jesus had no siblings.  This is not "normal" within the context of the traditional Catholic family.