This Catholic ‘earthquake’ on homosexuality is splitting the Church

This tweet about the Vatican Synod on the Family has appeared in my timeline and it speaks volumes about the chaos the debates are generating:

Cardinal Wilfred Napier, Archbishop of Durban, is a participant at the Synod and sometimes spoken of as the first black Pope. His quote refers not just to the media talk of an ‘earthquake’ in Catholic attitudes towards homosexuality but also to yesterday’s document that produced it.

To quote Prof James Hitchcock, writing in the National Catholic Register, ‘there are internal tensions at the Synod that have become public, despite efforts to keep them confidential. Some bishops seem to be working to achieve diverse goals, often in opposition to one another.’

Hitchcock is one of the world’s leading conservative Catholic intellectuals. I don’t share all his views on the Church’s attitude towards gay people, which has in the past seemed unremittingly harsh.

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But you don’t have to be a conservative to grasp that yesterday’s mid-way report on the Synod debates was badly judged.