Once again, Pope Francis has shown he may not quite be the rainbow-flag-waving Pontiff the left has conjured up in their imagination. In his opening remarks Monday at the interfaith colloquium titled "The Complementarity of Man and Woman," hosted by the Vatican, Pope Francis made the shocking pronouncement that children deserve a mom and a dad, reports Catholic News Agency.
Speaking before an audience of multiple religious leaders around the world, including Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church and the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Pope Francis said, "children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child's development and emotional maturity.”
The Roman Pontiff also emphasized the importance of male/female "complementarity" while cautioning against the notion that “all the roles and relations of the two sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern.”
“Complementarity will take many forms as each man and woman brings his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage," he said, "and to the formation of their children – his or her personal richness, personal charisma.”
He also took issue with those who wish to label this new wave of sexual immorality as some sort of liberation.
“This revolution in manners and morals has often flown the flag of freedom," he added, "but in fact it has brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.”
Francis also endorsed the Catholic Church's long-held tradition of natural law in relation to the family, arguing that language and political ideologies cannot change biological facts.
“Family is an anthropological fact," he said, "which cannot be qualified based on ideological notions or concepts important only at one time in history.”
As usual, when Pope Francis makes a statement of this kind, the mainstream media has been completely silent, or at least tried to downplay it. Reporting for Time, Rishi Iyengar said "the Pontiff’s announcement at the conclusion of his speech that he will attend Philadelphia’s World Meeting of the Families in September was conversely deemed a nod toward more acceptance of nontraditional families."
The statement holds no water since Philadelphia's World Meeting of the Families will be hosted by Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, a man who has affirmed quite emphatically the church's tradition on homosexuality and same-sex marriage. At the conclusion of the Synod of Bishops On the Family, Chaput also said he felt "very disturbed" with regard to the ambiguous language toward homosexuality and cohabitation present in the mid-term report.
