In a recent interview the Pope said:

If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge that person?

Since the Catholic Church hasn’t changed its view that while same sex attraction is not sinful, homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered”, the Pope was obviously referring to a celibate gay person.

This did not deter the Diocese of New Westminster’s Dean Peter Elliot from taking the Pope’s statement and using it to imply that he suddenly supports gay marriage.

So goes the tortured logic of liberal Anglicanism.

Dean Peter Elliot’s talk is aptly named, The Spirit of the Time.

From here:

Obviously the furthest thing from the Pope’s mind when he held his impromptu press conference last Sunday evening was that his remarks about gay people would be received, in Vancouver BC, at the beginning of Gay Pride Week. This annual festival culminates on August 4 with Vancouver’s largest parade with well over 100,000 people downtown.

It wasn’t always so. For generations homosexual people were relegated to the sidelines of society, forced to hide relationships and encouraged to lie. The first pride parades attracted but a few participants and often incurred the ridicule of homophobic onlookers. But over the years a transformation – you might even say transfiguration-of consciousness in Canadian society occurred. Many things contributed to this change of mind including the decriminalization of homosexuality, the increasing numbers of LGBT people ‘coming out’ to families and friends, the public face of the gay men’s health crisis of HIV-AIDS, and an exploration of sexuality by scientists leading to the conclusion that homosexuality is simply a normative variation in human nature, in and of itself, morally neutral.

The Anglican Church of Canada and its sister church in the US, the Episcopal Church have been deeply involved in this discussion: for well over a decade, church councils and conventions were dominated by heated debates about the place of LGBT people within the church and the status of our committed relationships. This diocese of New Westminster became a primary location for this: through the leadership of our Bishop Michael Ingham and the passionate voices of laity and clergy this became the first diocese in the Anglican Communion where, in 2002, a rite for the blessing of committed same sex relationships was authorized. In 2003 Canadian courts followed, opening the institution of marriage to same-sex couples, a position that was later endorsed by federal Parliament and the provincial legislatures. Within the last year the President of the US has advocated for same sex marriage, and then last Sunday the Pope made his comments.

[…..]

Pope Francis, in his statement If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge that person opens the possibility that the good news of Jesus includes all of God’s beloved children. It is in Christ that all of us seek transformation so that we too can take our part in bringing liberation and dignity to all people-taking our part in the bending arc of the universe toward justice.

The worthy Dean has been so busy exerting himself in the bending arc of the universe, he missed the Freudian slip.