Straight from the Pope's mouth

[Silver]

Since he's such a prominent individual, I figure he deserves his own thread.

Pope Francis insists sexual sins are ‘not the most serious’
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/09/po...sex-pride/

[Fireball]

I'm ecstatic that the RCC has orders of magnitude less power. It'll be a good day when it tapers to ~zero.

[Belacqua]

Since he's such a prominent individual, I figure he deserves his own thread.

Pope Francis insists sexual sins are ‘not the most serious’
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/09/po...sex-pride/

This has been the standard Catholic view pretty much forever. 

Dante makes it clear that lust is the sin that's least harshly punished and easiest to forgive.

In surveys, Italians tend to agree with this; they rank pride and greed as the worst. Americans usually have different views.

[brewer]

I don't trust him. Sounds like an out for the clergy pedophiles.

[Belacqua]

I don't trust him. Sounds like an out for the clergy pedophiles.

That's not classified as a crime of lust. 

That's a crime of premeditated betrayal of someone over whom you have a charge of care. It's a far worse sin.

[brewer]

I don't trust him. Sounds like an out for the clergy pedophiles.

That's not classified as a crime of lust. 

That's a crime of premeditated betrayal of someone over whom you have a charge of care. It's a far worse sin.

Lust is not mentioned in the article, sex is. Got a non sex motivated pedophile I don't know of?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Since he's such a prominent individual, I figure he deserves his own thread.

Pope Francis insists sexual sins are ‘not the most serious’
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/09/po...sex-pride/

 I guess he's doing his best and his attitude about sins of the flesh is very liberal for a pope, even though he told a fib.
Hard to dislike such an affable, gentle old fart.  IMO he's more dangerous than Ratzinger, the reactionary old turd he replaced. He will lull people into the false belief that he's actually going to change the church, and for the better. He isn't.

He said the church does not have the power to change sacraments. That's not quite right according to church doctrine: The church actually invented the seven sacraments. It can invent a new ones if it likes .Say one or more for non hetero individuals/couples. 

The church has the power to change whatever it likes.  It's church teaching that Jesus gave that power to Peter  :

Matthew 18: 18  "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven". (KJV)

That's the passage the Catholic church uses to justify its claim of the infallibility of the pope. Oddly, not one other Xian sect interprets that passage the same way.

[Fireball]

Since he's such a prominent individual, I figure he deserves his own thread.

Pope Francis insists sexual sins are ‘not the most serious’
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/12/09/po...sex-pride/

This has been the standard Catholic view pretty much forever. 

Dante makes it clear that lust is the sin that's least harshly punished and easiest to forgive.

In surveys, Italians tend to agree with this; they rank pride and greed as the worst. Americans usually have different views.

Dante made up what today would be a sci fi story of hell. There is a lot in his Inferno that never existed before, in the RCCs BS. He wasn't a member of the clergy, unless you can show me differently.

[Fake Messiah]

Is it not difficult to imagine that relations between a layperson and a priest might be consensual, given the priest's ontological superiority and privilege within this particular religious world?

Scholar of religion Mark Jordan refers to Catholicism as an “empire of closets.” Priests have been sexually active throughout the modern era (and before), with children and adolescents, with nuns, with seminarians, and with each other, depending on the nature of individual priests' needs and inclinations; these sexual activities have taken place in churches, rectories, convents, and schools, in the missions, in orphanages, in mother and baby homes, and in private residences, often owned by priests’ families basically everywhere.

[Belacqua]

Dante made up what today would be a sci fi story of hell. There is a lot in his Inferno that never existed before, in the RCCs BS. He wasn't a member of the clergy, unless you can show me differently.

I suspect that "sci fi" may be a bit of an anachronism. He was working in an old allegorical tradition, of which he produced by far the greatest work in that genre.

And of course he didn't write only about hell. The two thirds on Purgatory and Heaven are far more beautiful and fascinating. 

But you're right that he was not writing prophecy or scripture. Nor was he a clergyman. He did write fiction which dramatizes and symbolizes Christian theology, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas. The structure and symbolism of the poem make difficult theology much more accessible.

Of course he made up characters or imagined events which are fictional, but in every case these serve to clarify the theology.

It's generally agreed that in those passages where his symbolism differs from Aquinas, this is done for poetic reasons, to depict things which, according to standard theology, would not be visible to embodied humans. Showing heaven as having spatial extension, for example, is incompatible with Catholic views of what heaven is like. But Dante is careful to remind us, over and over, that the character he's portraying has been granted special privileges, and visions of symbols, so he can go back and report. Near the end of the Paradiso he uses the ineffibility topos so often that we really can't miss the fact that what he's telling us is a poetic approximation to something that can't be verbalized.

Popes Julius II and Leo X didn't hesitate to acknowledge Dante's greatness, when they designed the program for Raphael's masterpiece the Stanza Della Stegnatura, a group of frescoes honoring the very greatest of those who contributed to Western knowledge. He is the only figure to be portrayed twice in these frescoes -- once in the literature section and once in the theology section.