New Pope! New Pope! New Pope! New Pope! Say it loud, say it proud, we are still loving Pope Francis, and we are still totally doing our Vatican III watch. Soon we're going to set up a betting pool or something so we can all try to pick the exact day he will announce. Today, he moves ever closer to V-Three by saying that maybe persecuting divorced people just isn't the way to go for the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis on Friday said couples whose marriages fail should be “accompanied” and not “condemned”, wading into a debate on divorce that is testing his promise to put the Church in touch with modern life.

“When love fails, and it fails many times, we have to feel the pain of that failure, accompany the people who have felt the failure of their love,” the pope said during the daily mass he holds in the Vatican.

“Don’t condemn them! Walk with them!” he said, adding: “We have to be so close to the brothers and sisters who have suffered the failure of love in their lives”.

Ohemgee cue Catholic bishop and cardinal infighting shitstorm.

It will come as no surprise that pretty much everyone, including devout Catholics, thinks that barring people who get divorced from re-marrying or taking Communion is some bullshit.

A survey by the Spanish-language network Univision in 12 mainly Catholic countries found that 75 percent of Europeans, 67 percent of Latin Americans and 59 percent of Americans were at odds with the Church on the issue, while in Africa 19 percent of respondents disagreed.

It will also come as no surprise, however, that the head of the reactionary retrograde Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was Pope Ratzi's baby back in the day, says that allowing people to divorce and remarry and not have to give up their faith will never happen, because rules beat people every time

German Cardinal Ludwig Mueller, head of the Church’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has said the current rules are “impossible to change” and that people should stop thinking of marriage as “a party in a church”.

But in this corner, we have sane and sensible cardinals who think that maybe the CFD could stop being such authoritarian bitches.

Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, a member of the council of eight cardinals established by the pope to advise him, has taken a more lenient line and has asked Mueller to be “more flexible”.

Look, we are actually perfectly aware that this is a complicated issue because marriage is a sacrament and there are no backsies on sacraments so how do you undo one marriage and start another one, but New Pope is gonna figure all that shit out for us when he has the coolest Vatican Council ever, so just hang tight.

[Raw Story]