Horrified Guardian Realizes the Pope May Be Catholic

The deuce you say. Didn’t the zuccheto give the Guardian its first hint?

Now that the cardinals have elected the former Robert Cardinal Prevost as the new pontiff, the media has begun to dig into his track record. This comes in part because the now-Pope Leo XIV didn’t make any of their silly papabili scorecard coverage before and during the conclave, which has forced outlets like the Guardian to play catch-up. One day later, the paper has “unearthed” public comments about Leo XIV’s former teachings on Catholic family doctrine, which were (a) never buried in the first place, and (b) come right out of the Catechism.

That certainly explains their surprise:

After years of sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis, LGBTQ+ Catholics expressed concern on Thursday about hostile remarks made more than a decade ago by Father Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, in which he condemned what he called the “homosexual lifestyle” and “the redefinition of marriage” as “at odds with the Gospel”.

In a 2012 address to the world synod of bishops, the man who now leads the church said that “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel – for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia”.

In the remarks, of which he also read portions for a video produced by the Catholic News Service, a news agency owned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the cleric blamed mass media for fostering so much “sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyles choices” that “when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel”.

“Catholic pastors who preach against the legalization of abortion or the redefinition of marriage are portrayed as being ideologically driven, severe and uncaring,” Prevost added.

Even this portrays a false dichotomy, one that took root in the Synod on the Family in 2014. Pope Francis had offered welcoming language at the Synod to lesbians and gay men, because the church welcomes everyone to hear the Gospel. The issue at the Synod was not being “welcoming,” but how to reach the children of broken families and those damaged by secular approaches to family life for greater evangelization. The secular media lost its collective mind over this, transported by notions that the Catholic Church would change its doctrine to include same-sex marriage, when that was never even on the table. 

We talk a lot about media bias. Covering that Synod from the Vatican shocked even me about how bad it can get, especially when covering religious matters. 

At any rate, while it’s refreshing to see formerly Cardinal Prevost speaking as directly on Catholic doctrine as he did, it’s hardly surprising. Nor is it “unwelcoming,” but rather honest about Catholic teaching on family life. The point of the church is not to expand membership through the watering down or dismissal of the Gospel, but to save souls through the disciplined evangelization of its truth, beauty, and love. We know that the world will tend to reject it because of its fallen nature, and that even the faithful will fall short of it because of our fallen natures. But that doesn’t relieve the church from proclaiming it in order to remind us of the true path of salvation.

And if you don’t believe in that, why would these remarks bother anyone in the first place? 

Jim Geraghty scoffs at the comparison as well:

Let’s not overstate those “sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis,” either. Francis said he blessed the individuals in a gay marriage, not the gay marriage itself. A lot of people either accidentally misinterpreted it, deliberately misinterpreted it, or heard what they wanted to hear instead of what was actually said. I was reminded of the periodic vibe of surprise and sense of betrayal whenever Pope Francis reiterated the church’s adamant, full-spectrum opposition to abortion. It was as if certain Western elites believed that any man who appeared on the covers of The Advocate, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the Italian edition of Vanity Fair simply had to be pro-choice.

Jim also catches the New York Times playing catch-up:

As bishop in Chiclayo, he opposed a government plan to add teachings on gender in schools. “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist,” he told local news media.

When you ask a Catholic leader how many genders there are, you should expect an answer that is significantly lower than the number of Baskin Robbins flavors.

Indeed. 

In fact, we should all temper our expectations and speculation about the direction of this pontificate. Popes move in concert with the bishops of the Catholic Church as a whole, a point which the 2014 Synod made crystal clear. As the Vicar of Christ and the regent of what is an absolute monarchy (to be precise politically, as Christ is the King), pontiffs have extraordinary power, authority, and influence to set priorities and to craft policies and practices. Popes have no authority to change doctrine unilaterally, and more than just in a technical sense, neither does the entire episcopate. That means that the Catholic Church will remain Catholic, and that the media should really inform itself of what that means before “unearthing” the most quotidian of positions.