Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, with a new document explaining a radical change in Vatican policy by insisting that people seeking God’s love and mercy shouldn’t be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it.
The document from the Vatican’s doctrine office, released Monday, elaborates on a letter Francis sent to two conservative cardinals that was published in October. In that preliminary response, Francis suggested such blessings could be offered under some circumstances if they didn’t confuse the ritual with the sacrament of marriage.
The new document repeats that rationale and elaborates on it, reaffirming that marriage is a lifelong sacrament between a man and a woman. And it stresses that blessings should not be conferred at the same time as a civil union, using set rituals or even with the clothing and gestures that belong in a wedding.
But it says requests for such blessings should not be denied full stop. It offers an extensive definition of the term “blessing” in Scripture to insist that people seeking a transcendent relationship with God and looking for his love and mercy should not be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” as a precondition for receiving it.
adaptation to modern times of the scriptures
The scriptures don’t adapt, only their interpretation.
That’s untrue, scriptures have been adapted many many times. There’s no one agreed upon definition of what the Bible even is, varying significantly between different sects of Christianity, and even more as we broaden to other Abrahamic religions. There’s near endless variations of the different texts. Translation, copying, and selection of which texts to include in a scripture is inevitably bound up in interpretations, they’re inseparable. New ideas, biases, agendas, and shifts in meaning will work their way into the translation or copying of older texts or what sources to derive the translations from. Words don’t stay the same over time in any language and are constantly shifting in meanings.
Now some religious people may say, God inspires the people who select what religious texts to use, their copying, and their translations, to ensure perfect unchanging meaning over time. But outside of invoking miracles this is an impossibility. But this is what people who take a literal interpretation of the Bible believe.
Barring miracles though, start with development and history section below if interested, but there’s countless opportunities for the scriptures to have changed, and they are still changing. There’s no way they couldn’t, language itself wouldn’t let it stay static no matter how much effort is put in to it, not even thinking of all the other factors and agendas that have changed them or what they even consist of many times over thousands of years. There’s no one definitive Bible that sprang fully formed out of some vacuum, and even if that somehow occured it’d have to drift overtime with language itself.
scriptures have been adapted many many times
We’re using the word “adapted” in different ways. There may be no authoritative bible text but texts which are considered to be bibles don’t change in response to their environment. They may be rewritten or translated but the originals are still the originals.
No I’m using it the same way. What I’m saying is there is no such thing as an “original” Bible text, and even if there was people don’t all agree what those texts should be or which versions of those texts to begin from. And even if they did there’d be no way to perfectly preserve their meaning over the many of thousands of years they developed. And the re interpretations at every step along the way will influence how they get passed down and rewritten. Our current versions of all the many different religious texts are all a part of a long process of evolution, some even with common ancestors. Meanings, connotations, words, passages, entire books, and all sorts of things change at every step for many different reasons. They didn’t just appear suddenly out of nowhere. Many started even as an oral tradition.
Ranvier is completely correct. There is no definite version of the bible even if you went back to the original languages. If you add up all the text variations that are known as of today the number exceeds the number of total words in the NT. And when you add in translation issues the problem is endless. Plus all the stuff that looks like it was never in there originally, like the endings of Mark or the Adultress in John. The Bible is like a much dumber version of Wikipedia.
