The error—or signal?—in the pope’s blessings announcement

Plus: The Charlie Chaplin, the great cousin decline, and more

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

The error—or signal?—in the pope’s blessings announcement

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This week you’ll no doubt have seen the hubbub over the Catholic Church’s announcement about blessings for gay couples. The headlines were confused, confusing, and much-debated—I had to text a Catholic friend to be directed to better-informed accounts, and even after that it took me a couple days to form an opinion.

You see, depending on who tells it, this is either a monumental change or basically none at all, either a total overhaul of Rome’s longstanding doctrine of marriage or its explicit preservation, either a great pastoral wisdom or a serious (and maybe even malicious) assault on the faith.

And those divergent opinions are not unreasonable, frankly, because of how the document at issue is written.