Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, selected as the new head of the Catholic Church, will be a Pope who embraces a conservative doctrine in theory, yet not necessarily in practice, at least based on his time as a cardinal in Argentina.
Tony Castro, in an opinion piece at Voxxi.com, writes, “Pope Francis may not look it. But make no mistake, he is a 76-year-old rebel – he is a Jesuit, after all — and on Wednesday he became a rebel with a cause: Making the church relevant again and bringing it into the 21st century. And as an Argentine, he brings a tradition immersed in a heritage that is uniquely Hispanic and that has influenced the history and culture of the Americas.”
The new pope, Castro says, is officially against gay marriage but not necessarily actively opposed. “It has been on Bergoglio’s watch that Argentina became the first Latin American country to legalize gay marriage, while its president, Cristina Fernandez, promoted free contraception and artificial insemination. Bergoglio couldn’t stop that tide of modern civilization, and you have to wonder if he really tried despite his rhetoric against such contemporary developments as gay adoptions,” Castro wrote.
Pope Francis is also on the record as criticizing the church’s clerics. Castro wrote about a speech the new pontiff made where he “accused fellow church officials of hypocrisy for forgetting that Jesus Christ bathed lepers and ate with prostitutes.” According to Castro, Pope Francis said, “In our ecclesiastical region there are priests who don’t baptize the children of single mothers because they weren’t conceived in the sanctity of marriage,” preferring instead to lose the women and their children as followers. “These are today’s hypocrites,” the Pope said in that speech, “Those who separate the people of God from salvation.”
Photo (c) The Vatican
