Maybe Mr. Blair's Views Will Mature

Mr. Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, thinks the church's teaching that sex outside marriage, including homosexual sex, is wrong will have to change. He seems to think Benedict's exposition of that teaching is an "attitude" that results from his age. The church will just have to get with the times, it seems.

Mr. Blair when he took RCIA apparently was taught that the Church's teaching is simply a matter of opinion and needs to get with the program, so to speak.

In the London Times, Ruth Gledhill reports, "Speaking to the gay magazine Attitude, the former Prime Minister, himself now a Roman Catholic, said that he wanted to urge religious figures everywhere to reinterpret their religious texts to see them as metaphorical, not literal, and suggested that in time this would make all religious groups accept gay people as equals.''

The church teaches that all people are equal in that they they are made in the image and likeness of God. Not all behavior is equally moral, however.

Damian Thompson in the Telegraph suggests maybe Mr. Blair ahould change his attitudes, particularly on abortion. Blair "calls for Pope Benedict to rethink the Church's "entrenched" attitude on homosexuality. [Thompson asks,] Well, the Pope would rather like Mr Blair to rethink his entrenched support for abortion, but he hasn't done so, has he?"

The outgoing primate of the English church, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, received Tony Blair into the church. The good Archbishop of Westminster seems to think burdening his flock with the church's teaching is too heavy a cross. Both Damian Thompson and the Economist ("The church’s new English head is a tougher customer than his predecessor") see his successor, Manchester's Archbishop Vincent Nichols, as cut from a different cloth.