What pope Francis is trying to do is combine doctrinal orthodoxy with pastoral sensitivity.
It's not enough to tell people they're wrong.
It's funny because pro-lifers have understood this for decades. You can't just tell a woman abortion is murder. You have to find the reasons for her desire for abortion, and help solve her problems.
But somehow this message of outreach and compassion is lost in the conservative Catholic blogosphere. All Pope Francis is trying to do is take what we've learned in the pro-life movement and apply it to the rest of the Church
How do we reach out to gays? How do we reach out to the divorce & remarried?
In sum, we need to learn this lesson:
To put it a bit differently, conservative Catholics tend to slip into the belief that we can convert people by arguing with them, while liberals believe they can convert people by agreeing with them. Both are wrong. To bring people into the Church we need to meet them, befriend them, listen to them, accompany them, evangelize them. That is the fundamental message of Pope Francis, and to drive home that message he is willing to tolerate—perhaps even to encourage—a raucous Synod meeting.
And about that synod meeting.
Nobody seems to raise the possibility that perhaps Pope Francis is allowing Cardinal Kasper to speak because he thinks he's wrong, and this is how you destroy an argument.
You let the person advancing it make it.
Then you let everyone shoot it down.
Isn't this what happened at the Council of Nicea? Arian was allowed to make his point.
Then it was torpedoed.
