This topic probably wouldn’t have merited much comment, in this space, but it was the subject of some Twitter exchanges, yesterday, and I know that at least Dave Rogers, filling in for Matt Allen on WPRO, took the topic up with all seriousness.

From what I can tell, it started with a National Catholic Reporter article titled, “Pope on homosexuals: ‘Who am I to judge?’,” and the insta-sensation was that the intriguing new Pope was shifting Church policy on gays.  Even within that article, the headline cuts out an important part of the meaning of what Francis said: “Who am I to judge them if they’re seeking the Lord in good faith?” Put differently in the same article: “If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?”

This is fully in line with longstanding Church teachings on the matter, namely that homosexuality is an inclination toward a particular sin.  I suppose one could place all sins on a spectrum of severity, although that would sort of miss the Church’s approach to the concept of sin, and I won’t presume to fill in the chart.

Indeed, expanding the quotation, it’s clear that Pope Francis intended to articulate precisely the view expressed in the Catholic Catechism:

I think that when we encounter a gay person, we must make the distinction between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of a lobby, because lobbies are not good.  They are bad.  If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge that person?  The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this point beautifully but says, wait a moment, how does it say, it says, these persons must never be marginalized and “they must be integrated into society.”

The problem, I think, is that the Roman Catholic Church is arguably the most contemplative organization in the world. It is structurally designed around the question of, “How do we best develop our understanding of God’s will?”  This means, first, that it’s not subject to (as Pope Francis himself put it last month in the context of France’s same-sex marriage controversy) “fashions and ideas of the moment.”  It means, second, that its two millennia of nuance will often be misread by the sensationalizing, black-and-white narrative of modern news and pop culture.

The intellectual response to the Church, when its representatives are articulating hard truths, is to dismiss the softer edges.  If a cleric says we must be careful not to dehumanize people as we hold firm in the belief that what they do is wrong, the response is: “You don’t really mean the ‘don’t dehumanize’ part.”  And when the Pope suggests that gay people can be good people, and good Catholics, the response is: “Aha! Radical change!”

At issue is the extremely narrow range of thought permitted by modern intellectuals’ invented system of identity politics.  Within that stultifying box, to accept somebody as homosexual means to accept not only his particular attractions, but also his full expression of those attractions, and also his treating those attractions as the defining quality of his whole being.

(Unbelievably, folks actually buy the premise that identity politics express the worldview of the tolerant!)

It isn’t much of a presumption to infer that the Pope would hold that a person who “seeks the Lord” with “good will” sees that endeavor as the defining quality of his being.  That the person has particular attractions is incidental, more a definition of the type of cross that he must bear through life (again, in the language of the Catechism).

It may even be that a particular individual could order his whole household life around his attraction and still seek God in full harmony with the Church’s teachings.  The relationship of individuals with their Creator is just that: individual.  It is at that level that one cannot judge sinfulness from afar, but at the same time, a world that wants a grand, global pronouncement of non-judgmentalism will inevitably be disappointed.