UPDATE 5: Vatican claims document does not signal opening to gay marriage.
UPDATE 4: Michael Voris take on the report.
UPDATE 3: Edward Pentin’s commentary regarding earlier reports.
UPDATE 2: We have just learned this may be an intentional campaign of disinformation on the part of some who are projecting their desires onto the commission’s report. The report is now in the hands of competent journalists who should have more information on this shortly. Until then, caution should be exercised regarding this story.
UPDATE 1: Here’s a new story in English: Breaking News: Pontifical Biblical Commission Is Re-evaluating Divorce and Homosexuality
From Infovaticana – translated via Google Translate
At the request of the Pope, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the highest technical ecclesial organism in interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, has issued a report on the anthropological vision in the Bible in which the conception of homosexuality is radically revised.
A new and more adequate understanding of the human person imposes a radical reservation on the exclusive valuation of the heterosexual union in favor of an analogous reception of homosexuality and homosexual unions,” can be read in the study commissioned by His Holiness to Pontifical Biblical Commission on the anthropological vision of the Bible, which includes extensive attention to the issue of homosexuality, whose expression conceives as “a legitimate and dignified expression of the human being.”
Will 2020 be the year of the great revision of the Catholic conception of homosexuality and homosexual relationships? In principle, it does not seem necessary to be especially suspicious to see it probable. Although this report does not cease to be that, a report, without any doctrinal or pastoral value until the Pope makes any decision in this regard, the fact adds up to dozens of indications throughout the last year that persistently point in that direction.
The issue is twofold: on the one hand, the very concept of homosexuality that, although in no case would it have a moral assessment in itself, does condition the doctrinal response to its concrete expressions. Until now, the Catechism of the Catholic Church considers homosexual orientation as “objectively disorderly,” within the framework of a conception of sex aimed at both reproduction – co-creative cooperation with God by man – and a complementarity that will be image and figure of the relationship of Christ with his Church. If, on the other hand, a “new and more adequate understanding of the human person” is imposed, to cite the words of the report, and it is concluded, in the manner of some German bishops, that homosexuality is a condition as ‘adequate’ as heterosexuality ,
Because that’s the other ‘leg’: homosexual relationships. In the traditional doctrine, which dates back to before the Incarnation itself, the homosexual relationship was not only categorically condemned, but also included the four types of sin that “claim Yahweh’s revenge”. And to ask, as the Pontifical Commission seems to do, to “welcome” analogously to heterosexual unions, homosexuals seem to us absolutely incompatible with this vision.
The ‘brake’ on a change in this direction, even from favorable and progressive positions, was the repeated and unequivocal condemnation of this type of relationship in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the Letters of St. Paul.
Apparently, the Pontifical Commission hints at some kind of misunderstanding in this conception when it argues that “according to some”, “the Bible says little or nothing about this type of erotic relationship, which therefore should not be condemned, also because often unduly It is confused with other aberrant sexual behaviors. ”
And it concludes with a language that already sounds to us: “The exegetical examination conducted on texts of the Old and New Testaments has made appear elements that are considered by an assessment of homosexuality, in its ethical implications. Certain formulations of the biblical authors, such as the Levitical disciplinary directives, require an intelligent interpretation that safeguards the values that the sacred text tries to promote, therefore, literally repeating what also brings cultural traits of that time. Pastoral attention will be required, particularly with regard to individual persons, to carry out that service of good that the Church must assume in its mission for men. ”
It was all a matter of the “cultural features of that time”, probably, and we have been in a tragic mistake for two thousand years.