It was announced on Saturday, two days ago, that Fr. Pasolini has been named the new “Preacher of the Pontifical Household,” arguably the most prominent preaching “pulpit” in the Church, next to that of the Pope himself.

Soon after the choice was announced, it was reported that some of the past statements of this friar, especially regarding homosexuality, seemed little in keeping with traditional Church moral teaching.

This prompted many to ask: Should a man with views like Pasolini be chosen to become the preacher and leader of spiritual retreats for… the Roman Curia, the central government of the Church?

Letter #50, 2024, Monday, November 18: Pasolini

Ok — fasten your seatbelts… we’re in for a somewhat bumpy ride.

A ride I would prefer not to begin.

I would prefer to avoid the “insanity” — meaning, precisely, things “not sane,” not healthy (“sanus” in Latin means “healthy”) — like speculations about the sexual life of Jesus and Lazarus, and the Apostles.

After incessant speculation throughout our society, including over such matters, one longs for simple things, sensible things, non-crazy things.

Yet here we go.

A 53-year-old Franciscan friar and biblical scholar has just been named the “Preacher of the Pontifical Household.”

His style of preaching is said to “address issues related to human existence and faith, while making them relevant to contemporary issues and trends.”

Here is the essence of the problem.

If one addresses “issues related to human existence and faith” by “making them (those issues) relevant to contemporary issues and trends,” one inevitably distances oneself from the way these issues were seen by Christ, the Apostles, St. Paul, and the Church Fathers.

This way of looking at things in a way that is “relevant” to “contemporary issues and trends” may be called “presentism.” Why? Because “in literary and historical analysis, presentism is a term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.” (link)

“Presentism” regards the criteria of “today,” of our “present times,” as decisive.

But the Catholic way of seeing things has always believed that what is decisive is how things were seen in the time of Christ, and just after Christ, that is, how Christ, the Apostles, St. Paul, and the Church Fathers, saw things.

This modern trend of judging things according to “the criteria of our time” may also be called “modernism,” and modernism implies, inevitably, a departure from the apostolic criteria, criteria which from the beginning have been decisive for Christians.

This “presentism,” this “modernism,” is a hermeneutic which draws us away from the apostolic way of understanding, interpreting, and believing.

Back to Father Pasolini.

People watching his videos, reading his writings, noticed that he regularly allows his mind to wander through the pathways of the Scriptures to ask questions like whether or not:

— the stories of David and Jonathan

— the story of Jesus and the friend he raised from the dead, Lazarus

— the story of the Roman Centurion and his servant (the servant whom Jesus healed from a distance)

may have involved homosexual attraction and behavior.

Michael Haynes of Lifesitenews has written a useful piece on this case, here. His piece contains these paragraphs

The Catholic Church has clearly, consistently, and firmly condemned the practice of homosexual actions from Her earliest days. One such Scriptural example is in the first letter to the Corinthians, where St. Paul states that homosexual actions are sinful…

But speaking in February, Pasolini rejected this, saying: “Let us ask a question, because the question is legitimate: but is there any form of approval of same-sex relationships in Scripture? And the answer is not easily no, because in fact there are stories.”

He proceeded to work through passages from Scripture, highlighting certain ones which he suggested could be evidence of homosexual relationships. (Italian blog Messa in Latino has compiled a literal transcription of the friar’s talk, which though in Italian, can be easily translated.)

Pasolini pointed first to Jonathan and David, noting how it is “often invoked as a story of homosexual love,” but adding that to say they had a “homosexual relationship is a stretch to the text.” But despite this, he encouraged Catholics to “imagine” and “think” that Jonathan and David were actively homosexual, since “surely there were at the time stories [that is, cases, instances] of homosexual love, that is evident, so nothing prohibits us from being able to think it, from being able to imagine it.”

Pasolini also pointed to the Centurion who approached Jesus on behalf of his sick servant, and whose faith Christ greatly praised. The friar questioned why the Centurion was so devoted to a mere servant, positing that perhaps “as some say, maybe there was a relationship between the two of them.”

To imagine this “is not unseemly” said Pasolini, adding that if this were the case, then Christ would have heaped praise upon an active homosexual. “… Just think if that were the case: Jesus gave the highest praise to whom?”

This scenario would mean “that we have to revise all the opinions we have,” he continued, “or rather we have to ascertain that Jesus was actually not so afraid to speak well of people – to go back to the benediction [Fiducia Supplicans] that the Pope wrote recently and that raised a hornet’s nest.”

(…)

Not content with the above points, Pasolini made further reference to the argument made by homosexual activists that Christ and Lazarus had a homosexual relationship, or that there was such a relationship between Christ and the disciples. While not rejecting the idea, he described such a theory as “a way of trying to project into Scripture our own questions, our own curiosity, that is, we want to find something that is not written: it is a bit like if you read the wedding at Cana and you want to find out how the bride was dressed: it is not written, the Gospel does not tell you, so the Bible does not give us all the answers, because they are not necessary.”

(…)

Reaching the culmination of his argument, Pasolini argued that the Bible has “a certain condemnation of what we might call homosexuality.” But he said that linguistically, the word “homosexuality” has become a noun to refer to things that in the Bible are condemned, such as “homosexual acts, passive and active.”

“The Bible never speaks of homosexuality in general terms,” he said. “It deplores some concrete attitudes, some episodes, some actions, not the person. Here, there is no word against inclination, but against homosexual acts, what we might call ‘homogenitality,’ that is, according to Scripture a same-sex genital act has potentially active significance.”

This, Pasolini argued, meant that there is no Scriptural judgement “on the homosexual condition or orientation, what we today might call homosexuality as a psychological orientation or existential condition, that is, there is no word that goes to this category of people – that is, those who wake up and look at a person of the same sex and feel attraction to them – because these are the ones we are talking about today: not the people who have episodes of homosexuality, but the people who are experiencing something on an emotional, psychological level from which they cannot and do not want to find a distance.”

Furthermore, he argued that “the Bible does not even assume a world in which there is a tendency other than heterosexual: in the culture of that time, the only tendency that existed in the eyes of the authors and the people they saw was the heterosexual one.” Whilst modern society includes the concept of “homosexual people,” in the Biblical times “there was no talk about that, that’s why they were also stigmatized with that force of homosexual acts: they were acts that were immediately categorized as something that did not exist, like a woman putting on pants.”

[End, paragraphs from Michael Haynes of Lifesitenews]

The essence of the problem is that the entire “mens” (mind, worldview, mental outlook) of Western culture has, to put it in terms that Americans may understand, blown two tires on the passenger side of the car, so that the vehicle of our collective mind is now resting motionless, tilted down to the right, in the highway breakdown lane, on the rims of two popped and collapsed tires, rims which will simply shred through the rubber if we try to keep driving before we put on two fully blown up spares and get the vehicle righted again, balanced again.

This means we cannot move this vehicle — this cultural world, this “woke post-Christian West” — without replacing the two blown tires completely — without changing half of our “mens,” half of our entire worldview, half of our entire mental structure.

In other words, we have a trip-stopping problem, a problem which is a virus of the mind, a problem of how we see the world which has seeped into the mind of almost every single one of us, and is making it impossible for us to see things in the simple light of reason and common sense.

Past centuries did not have to speculate on whether Jesus and Lazarus may have had a homosexual relationship, but for an ordinary, studious Italian Franciscan friar of today, there is almost no way to avoid speculating about the matter as part a spiritual reflection.

We are now in the late twilight of Christendom.

Night has been descending for two-plus centuries, since the “Endarkenment” of the French philosophes and the French Revolution which grew out of their thought.

The shadows have been lengthening since Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris became the Revolution’s “Temple of Reason” in 1793, 231 years ago. The following is a historian’s summary reconstruction of what happened:

It was the 10th of November 1793 when an attractive young opera singer was carried on a palanquin to the doors of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The singer – scantily clad and bearing the pike of Jupiter – was to play the part of Liberty in one of the strangest performances the 600-year-old Catholic Cathedral would ever witness. Entering through the central doors, she walked down the long aisle of the great Cathedral to her stage – a paper-mache “mountain” which had been erected in the Cathedral’s nave. Around the mountain stood a troupe of ballet dancers, all bearing torches in her honor. On the top of the mountain sat a small Greek temple with the words “To Philosophy” inscribed on it. The singer seated herself below the temple as the gathered crowd sang hymns in her honor – “Thou, Saint Liberty, inhabit this temple, Be of our nation the Goddess,” they cried. When the songs concluded, the singer climbed to the Greek temple, turned to the crowd, and smiled. Uproarious cheers erupted, thus completing the transformation of France’s leading Cathedral into the Revolution’s Temple of Reason. (link)

This was a false Reason.

The true Reason, the Logos, incarnate in Christ, the Word of God, the Reason of God, the Meaning of God, the ordered sanity of the personal mind, has been eclipsed by veils and shadows and idle speculations.

We must return to the holy Logos, source of all being and all reason, and allow our own minds to be renewed into His.

This somehow should be the burden of the daily and hourly preaching at the summit of the Church in Rome, which is supposed to be the summit of Christ’s Church.

Here below are two other reports on this appointment, and the nature of the mind of the man appointed.

https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-50-2024-mon-nov-18-pasolini/