US: A Chicago Bishop Bans Funeral Rites For Gays and Questions Baptism For Their Children

So much for the Catholic Church’s new-found tolerance for same-sex couples. Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, has just issued a harsh decree about how he wants priests in his diocese outside of Chicago to treat same-sex couples both in life and in death. His decree came on the eve of Chicago’s Pride week, which he quite clearly does not like.

Paprocki is a hardliner who famously performed an exorcism when Illinois passed a same-sex union bill in 2013, telling the Chicago Tribune at the time that Pope Francis’s words about tolerance of gay priests—"Who am I to judge?"— were being misrepresented in the state legislature to suit politics.

“It is scandalous that so many Catholic politicians are responsible for enabling the passage of this legislation and even twisting the words of the pope to rationalize their actions despite the clear teaching of the church,” he said before performing the public exorcism. “Pope Francis is saying that same-sex ‘marriage’ comes from the devil and should be condemned as such.”

Last year, Pope Francis seemed to prove Paprocki wrong when he eased up on gays in his Apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which has been the root of a number of controversies since it came out, including a move led by American Cardinal Raymond Burke to try to force Francis into a corner to clarify his stance on church teachings and gays and divorced and remarried Catholics.

So far Francis has not budged, instead giving local pastors wiggle room when it comes to tending their flocks rather than defining what he does or does not mean when he calls for tolerance and greater understanding about the “complicated lives” of modern Catholics. Read more via the Daily Beast