Catholic Couple Urge Church to Welcome Gays — But Will Anything Change?

A devoutly Catholic straight couple, married for more than 50 years, have called on the church to welcome same-sex couples.

"The church constantly faces the tension of upholding the truth while expressing compassion and mercy. Families face this tension all the time," Ron and Mavis Pirola of Sydney, Australia, told the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican Monday, Catholic News Service reports.

They mentioned the example of friends whose gay son wanted to bring his partner to the family Christmas celebration. Their friends' attitude was simple and accepting, they said: "He is our son."

"What a model of evangelization for parishes as they respond to similar situations in their neighborhood," the Pirolas said. While the Catholic Church teaches that antigay discrimination is wrong, it also teaches that homosexual activity is a sin, and it does not approve of same-sex unions.

The couple also urged that the church may be more welcoming to divorced people. They said they have a divorced friend who "doesn't feel fully accepted in her parish" yet "turns up to Mass regularly and uncomplainingly with her children. For the rest of her parish, she should be a model of courage and commitment in the face of adversity."

The synod, which opened Monday and runs through Thursday is the first of two worldwide meetings of Roman Catholic bishops called by Pope Francis to discuss issues of marriage and family, with the second to come next year. The pope Monday directed attendees to speak candidly and "listen with humility," according to the National Catholic Reporter. "A general condition is this," Pope Francis said. "Speak clearly. Let no one say: 'This you cannot say.'"

Still, observers and the bishops themselves do not expect doctrinal change to come out of the synod. "I didn't hear anything about changing doctrine, but I heard a great desire to deepen our understanding of doctrine," Basilian Father Thomas Rosica told journalists after a series of closed sessions Tuesday, notes the Reporter. And Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary told the gathering Monday that responses to a pre-synod questionnaire sent to Catholics around the world made it "quite clear that the majority of the baptized ... do not expect that [same-sex] relationships be equated with marriage between a man and a woman."

Reporter columnist Thomas Reese, however, remarked that doctrine can change, and it has over the course of the church's history. "The only way the synod is going to change anything is for the bishops to first convince themselves that they are not changing doctrine, only the way they are expressing it," Reese wrote. "Any announcement must begin with 'As the church has always taught ... '"