Profoundly evolving. . .

So, if you can believe it, an Italian bishop has written a preface to Via Crucis di un ragazzo gay [Way of the Cross of a Gay Boy], a new book by Luigi Testa, an Italian law professor.  Apparently the bishop found the book compelling and worth the read.  But who is surprised or shocked by what comes forth from this Pope or those like him among the Roman prelates.

“We have a profoundly evolving understanding of sexuality, much richer, freer and more open than was given in traditional societies,” Bishop Savino wrote.  He concluded:  "The Church is either inclusive or it is not! The ongoing synodal process may help us grow in this inclusiveness to the extent that we are willing to heal many lacerations. They often concern the most intimate sphere of the baptized, that is, the emotional dimension. Let no one, therefore, be scandalized by this via crucis: it is the way of Jesus who, wanting to love everyone radically and definitively, pronounced the least understood of the beatitudes: “Blessed is he who is not scandalized by me.”

According to the bishop, the Church has a profoundly evolving understanding of just about everything -- sexuality and gender may be just a portion of that.  The danger to Rome lies in the evolutionary understanding of God's revelation and of His truth.  If everything is evolving, preservation is less important to the nature of the faith than is the task of staying ahead of that evolution.  Indeed, this is exactly what some voices, including often the current Pope's, have been saying for a long time.  It is the Roman Catholic version of the typical Protestant idea that you must change to survive.  The problem with that scenario is that what survives may not look like or sound like or accomplish anything that the Lord desires.

Indeed, the bishop has decided that change is the nature of and mark of God's own identity and being.  "Yes, dear readers: God surpasses us on every side, he is newer than any trend or doctrine, he gives us this time of ours as kairos in which to open ourselves to his life.”  God is so new that it is a task merely to keep up with His evolving changes in doctrine, truth, and practice.  The scandal lies not with those who depart from the yesterday, today, and forever faith but with those who fail to be made new by every iteration of that faith.  It is as if God were merely a mask, a changing mask, and the task of the faith were to keep up with His costume changes.  While that might fit in well with tenor of the times, it has nothing in common with the God of the Scriptures.  Perhaps the bishop is telling us that in order to keep up with God, we just might have to jettison the anchor of His Word.  The oddest thing in the world is that the people who suggest this sound so erudite and sincere in their delusion.  No one is as blind as the ones who refuse to see.  Perhaps the day will come when such folk will find Jesus Himself to be an enemy of His cause.  It might be that the heaviest weight Jesus must carry is our own unfaithfulness to His revelation and truth.