Perhaps he should not wrap it but just cut it off.
I will be happy to answer your questions when you answer my question. Pope Benedict made a few controversial comments regarding this topic a few years back, which you may recall. I hope that you are well.
OK. Thank you for answering my question. I hope that his wife does not get herpes or HIV and die.
I do not know if there are any circumstances in which contraception could be justified. Some argue that it is an intrinsic evil. Others argue that the traditional teaching of the church is limited to the use of contraception in the context of a volitional sex act between a married man and a married woman.
I do not expect that the pope will innovate a reversal in the teaching of the church.
I don't want to go though all of this and indicate where I disagree with you point-by-point. I think we may be talking past each other and I do not think that our debate will end in an agreement. We seem to have different foundational assumptions and different viewpoints on the way that language is used and what language means. For example, you wrote that I misspoke when I said "Look at that couple". From my perspective, I did not misspeak at all. It would completely natural for me to use that phrase in that situation and my friend would know exactly what I meant. Perhaps in your world people speak and use language differently and that is fine. Like I wrote, everyone has a different background and ways of looking at the same thing. Another example is your insistence that the word "couple" signifies sexual activity. I already addressed that point much earlier in the thread. Perhaps that is what the word signifies to you, but it does not signify that to me (St. Mary and Joseph being a "couple" of course). If you watch the videos by the conservative priest Mark Goring that are posted in this thread, you will see that he also does not buy into the hoopla that is made over the word "couple" in the document, so I know that I am not totally unreasonable here. I hope that you are well.
I don't think so. I don't think you have met my arguments, and I don't think the arguments you have provided are very good. I defended Traditionis Custodes up to a point on CF, but Fiducia Supplicans is a completely different beast. As I have argued, it is not possible to defend Fiducia Supplicans without taking up incredibly implausible positions.
I have been using the definition you provided from Merriam-Webster at the very beginning of our conversation (link). I have also given arguments about the context of that term within the document. I think we actually agreed, multiple times, that the "chaste couple" reading is implausible. This is especially true given that the document consistently speaks about same-sex couples in the same breath that it speaks about "couples in irregular situations." And if the couples in question were chaste, then not only would the document have been unnecessary, but the "scandal and confusion" it seeks to avoid would be unintelligible.
Be well, and take care not to contort yourself too much to try to save a strange teaching. We also have a duty to truth.
Gay people need to leave the lifestyle and repent of their sins, just like everyone else. Without repentance, there is no grace.
Amen.Now you know why St. John Paul II said he believed the future of the Catholic Church would come from Africa.
Likewise.
We had some debate on that. I would not say that "couple" is limited to "chaste couples". Nor would I say that "couple" signifies sexual activity. It is just a generic term used to indicate that two people have a romantic relationship. I do not completely recall all of this but I think the general point was that "sexual activity" is not a relevant factor in determining what makes two people a couple (or perhaps even a "union" for that matter).
Thank you. And you take care not to take the route of the Eastern Orthodox, Martin Luther, Marcel Lefebvre and many others who have "defended the truth" against the teachings of living magisterium.
Well let me remind you:
"Married, engaged, or otherwise romantically paired." According to Merriam-Webster what is at play is a sexual relationship or a pre-sexual relationship. The form of "romantic" at play is clearly the sort found in married and engaged couples. It's no coincidence that so many same-sex couples believe themselves to be married or engaged. Thus I said:Let's take the definition of the word "couple":
a: two persons married, engaged, or otherwise romantically paired
Definition of COUPLE
two persons married, engaged, or otherwise romantically paired; two persons paired together; pair, brace… See the full definitionwww.merriam-webster.com
So let me go out of my way to be very clear why your argument here does not succeed:
Your reasoning here is non-teleological, which is a problem for a Catholic. The relation of romance and sexual activity to the definition of a couple is not a matter of modal logic; it is a teleological notion. The epitome of a couple is a married couple, and marriage is the uniquely appropriate setting for sexual activity and procreation. A man and a woman who are dating or engaged are called a 'couple' because they partake, teleologically, in a possible future marriage. As their relationship matures it will accrue many of the trappings of a marriage, yet without becoming fully a marriage until they are wed. So romantic and sexual activity does not determine what makes two people a couple in the modal sense, but rather in the teleological sense. If two people are in no way ordered towards this epitome of marriage, then we do not call them a couple (and neither would we say that they are dating).
This has been and continues to be a debacle. Language has been twisted in defense of a new teaching on some new way of blessing just so the unblessable could be blessed. Tucho is too clever by half. And what he has succeeded in doing is to get a lot of Catholics who want to be faithful to magisterial teaching to work themselves into linguistic pretzels to try to find a way that this document, a serious sort of document that looks magisterial and looks like it should be assented to, isn't just plain wrong. We can now bless couples because couples don't really mean couples. See how that works? OK. So the pope isn't really wrong even if this is clunky and confusing. We have figured out a loophole by using creative language where pope Francis and his cardinals aren't endorsing and promoting sin but only figured out how to bless everyone, everyone, everyone, for everything and anything. Who could oppose that? As long as the couples were not dressed for a wedding and it didn't look like a wedding.
To answer your question - as an example, one reason why I think the document is imprudent is because the phrase "blessing of a same-sex couple" may suggest a meaning of "approving a sexual relationship between two men" when viewed in isolation. Anybody who studies the document carefully should know that the phrase (in context) does not teach "approving a sexual relationship between two men". But many people (such as secular media) are not apt to read a document carefully. So I think it creates bad optics for the Church, as I already wrote in this thread.
That's pretzel logic.
IF that's what the document means, 'couples but not sexually active couples' then it could have outright said that and everybody would have said "Ho hum nothing to see here". Cardinal Fernandez is a very careful wordsmith. If he had wanted to say this is only about non-sexual couples he would have said this is only about non-sexual couples. Instead he tries to make room for it by alluding to the possibility that non-sexual couples might be involved here and there, so it's really all OK.
Yes, but if the plain literal meaning of a sentence means one thing, and the context of the document tries to make it mean something else entirely, then the document is problematic. Any philosopher or theologian worth their salt would avoid this problem of poor writing and poor communication, where well-known words are being redefined on a partial basis. If we dig deeper we realize that there is a reason for the discrepancy: the document is required to mean diametrically different things at different times. It is to mean one thing for the Germans, another for the Africans.
Goring's point here is simply confused. Most words in most documents do not have well-defined theological or philosophical senses. If that were the case then the documents would be meaningless. They need to convey real information according to the literal sense of words if they are to have meaning. This is why Aquinas' theology is so robust and long-lived: because it almost always avoids using words in specialized, technical, or non-standard senses. It is the mark of a lover of truth.
When context attempts to reverse the meaning of words the document is self-contradictory. It's that simple.
Oh, rubbish. You can't just ignore all of my arguments time and time again and then talk about "the simple fact of the matter." I realize you haven't studied philosophy or theology, and perhaps you do not even understand the simple definition from Merriam-Webster that you cited, but ignoring all of the arguments and then asserting unintuitive positions is quite low.
No, it is the most logical thing that has ever been written in the history of the world.
Please watch the Michael Lofton video and read the document again. The word couple is used in a loose sense to refer to the persons of the couple, not the relationship itself. It does not matter if the relationship involves sexual activity or not because the relationship is not the object of the blessing. The two people are the object of the blessing.
Perhaps the best thing is to put the document away. Or at least to issue a formal clarification to address some of the objections that have been read. Like I wrote before, I agree that it is bad optics for the Church. But I'm not the pope and the decision is not mine to make.
I know right? Pope Francis should have gone further and restricted the use of the TLM entirely. Maybe that will come next.
