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But did he really reject them? Some Catholics and other Christians say definitely not.
Jesus Christ would be imprisoned in some countries because of his view that marriage is strictly a male-female union, says a conservative Roman Catholic cardinal from Germany.
“I believe that today, Jesus would not be condemned only because he is a Messiah,” Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller recently told the U.K.’s right-leaning GB News. “He would in Canada or the United States or European countries go to prison because he spoke out the truth about the marriage between a man and a woman.”
Müller was speaking in response to Pope Francis’s supportive comments about transgender people and actions against conservatives in the church. It was before the news about the pope’s approval of blessings for same-sex couples, but Müller has been a longtime opponent of any church recognition of same-sex relationships as well.
Last March, he spoke out against German Catholic clergy members who had already begun blessing same-sex unions, saying they used “heretical texts” and that the pope should punish them.
God “created male and female,” he added in the GB News interview.
'Jesus today would go to prison because he spoke the truth of a man and woman' | Cardinal Mulleryoutu.be
But what did Jesus and others in the Bible actually say about marriage, gender, and sexuality? It’s true that Jesus is quoted as using the “created male and female” line, and that he said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Of course, keep in mind that the Bible has been translated many times and that theologians and laypeople alike bring their own interpretations to it, even though fundamentalist Christians say they take every word literally.
The Bible makes clear that “marriage is sacred for Christians because it can represent the enduring love between Christ and the Church,” theologian Myles Markham wrote on the Human Rights Campaign’s website. “Christian partnership creates an opportunity to live out God’s love. While some kind of difference seems to be important in embodying this metaphor, understanding that all our differences can lead to empathy, compassion, good listening, sacrifice, and what it means to ‘love our neighbor as ourselves,’ there is scant evidence that it is our biology or our views of gender that are the required difference.”
Many Christian denominations perform marriages for same-sex couples and support LGBTQ+ people in general, including the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church (USA). The United Methodist Church is splitting over LGBTQ+ issues, with one group being pro-equality and the other not. Outside of Christianity, faiths that fully affirm LGBTQ+ people include Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Judaism (despite the name, Conservative Judaism is less conservative and far more LGBTQ-supportive than Orthodox Judaism). Some Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims are supportive as well.
In Roman Catholicism, many are welcoming the pope’s move toward greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ people. Among them is Father James Martin, a priest who has been working for years to “build a bridge,” as one of his books says, between the church and LGBTQ+ members.
The declaration on same-sex unions is a “major step forward in the church’s ministry to LGBTQ people and recognizes the deep desire in many Catholic same-sex couples for God’s presence in their loving relationships,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “It is also a marked shift from the conclusion ‘God does not and cannot bless sin’ from just two years ago.”
“Along with many priests I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex unions,” he concluded.
