Something got lost in the translation! Believe it or not, that, according to the Catholic News Agency's Vatican observer, Andrea Gagliarducci, is the Vatican's excuse for how the controversial Interim Report of the Synod on the Family came to be "misunderstood".
The document was written in Italian, which Pope Francis directed to be used as the official language of the synod. He did this because, as New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan admitted not long ago, few of the prelates can read or understand Latin any more. That the language of the Church has at last become "dead" is yet another of the poisoned fruits of Vatican II. Too bad, because Latin has always been esteemed by lawyers and theologians for its precision and lack of ambiguity.
The hoo-hah about the Church's sudden admiration for the LGBT community, as reported here on Tuesday, arises (they tell us now) from a mistranslation of paragraph 50 of the relatio [report]. The Italian original, after praising the "gifts and talents" homosexuals may [my emphasis] give to the Christian community, asked: "le nostre comunità sono in grado di esserlo accettando e valutando il loro orientamento sessuale, senza compromettere la dottrina cattolica su famiglia e matrimonio?"
In the English translation provided by the Vatican, this is rendered as: "Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?"
The key word "valutando" would be better translated as "evaluating," and, in this context, "weighing" or "considering". The English translation, however, suggests that the homosexual orientation should be "valued", a notion that old fuddie-duddies who are faithful to the traditional teaching of the Church find confusing, to say the least. Any suggestion that the use of "valuing" by the Vatican Press Office reveals a pro-LGBT bias are of course groundless!
Meanwhile... Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- aka the Holy Office in the old days when the name was appropriate -- has denounced the report as "worthless". Speaking in one of the Synod’s small working groups after the release of the relatio post disceptationem, the prelate said the document was "completely wrong" in its portrayal of the Synod fathers’ discussion. He added that it was "shameful" that the report had suppressed some points of view while promoting, errr, certain others.
More pushback came from South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, who told journalists the document had been misunderstood and that’s why it had caused "such an upset" -- the more so because the relatio is only an "interim report", and the Synod has not yet ended. "We couldn't possibly have agreed on it," he said, yet "The message has gone out, it is not what we are saying at all.... [But] there’s no way of retrieving it. It is not a true position. Whatever goes out after looks like damage control."
In a full page interview published in the Italian daily Il Foglio, American Cardinal Raymond Burke said, "It seems to me that information is being manipulated in a way that gives comment to only one theory instead of faithfully reporting the various positions expressed.... This worries me very much because a significant number of bishops do not accept the ideas of an opening, but few [people] know that."
Curiously, "Bully" Burke did not name those whom he held responsible for pushing the pro-queer agenda. He could only have meant the Vatican Press Office, which, as noted above, supplied the translation. Walt would have thought the Cardinal would have felt a little more freedom to name names, since he's being demoted from head of the Apostolic Signatura (the Vatican "Supreme Court") to exile in the largely ceremonial role as head of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. See "Pope Plans on Exiling Conservative Catholic Hero Cardinal Raymond Burke" on Breitbart.
Also on Tuesday, Cardinal Burke told Catholic World Report that the bishops "cannot accept" any changes that are not based in Scripture or Church teaching. He also said that a statement on the issue from Pope Francis is "long overdue". According to Marco Tosatti, writing in La Stampa, the Pope doesn't say anything during the Synod sessions, but contents himself with scribbling little notes which he passes to the Synod’s secretary-general, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri.
Further reading: Sinodo, il cardinale Mueller all'attacco: "Relazione vergognosa". Right... it's in Italian. But you can use Google Translator.
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