Rather than ministering only to the officially worthy, minister to everyone—gay, divorced, disenchanted—and then worry about making them worthy. “Don’t lead with the chin, don’t lead with controversy,” Dolan said. “Don’t even lead with the mouth. Lead with the heart and you’re going to win a lot of people.”That, of course, is not exactly how the Church worked before Francis came to town. During the last two pontificates, the rules came first, and often they tightened in response to cultural advances in the secular world. To many Catholics struggling with the pressures of real life in that real world, those rules meant Catholicism was an ever-more exclusive club where traditionalist prelates and Catholic fundamentalists could blackball anyone who couldn’t live by the rules. It was a Church in which homosexuals were “intrinsically disordered” and divorced and remarried Catholics were “adulterers.”
Leaving aside the mischaracterization of gays as "intrinsically disordered" (people are not intrinsically disordered) this parallels what I wrote about the purpose of the synod.
