Analysis Nov. 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - A Dominican friar, Fr. Adriano Oliva, has celebrated the 800th anniversary of his religious order with a book about the Church, the divorced and remarried, and homosexual couples.
Amours (Loves) is a study of St Thomas Aquinas definition of love and aims to show that the Angelic Doctor recognized the natural character of homosexuality. In the wake of the Synod on the family, Oliva pleads for new ways of welcoming divorced and remarried and homosexual couples into the Church and of recognizing their unions in civil law.
His editor, the editions du Cerf publishing house, is the historic Dominican editor in France, founded at the request of Pope Pius XI in 1929. It still functions under religious supervision.
The highest of friendships: this is how St Thomas Aquinas calls the unique, faithful and gratuitous love between two spouses who give themselves to each other in consecrated union, as a sacramental sign of the love of Christ for the Church, His spouse. Should couples who are divorced and remarried, who live out their union in a responsible manner, be banned from this friendship? Could it be that homosexual persons, who live as a couple with responsibility, be banned? reads the text accompanying the book on the Cerfs web-shop.
It goes on: Does a theological assessment of the naturality of the homosexual inclination, which St Thomas recognizes, not open the doors to new ways of welcoming same-sex couples within the Church? The anthropology of naturality then demands that civil rights be accorded to such couples in national legislations.
Besides putting homosexual unions on a same plane with conjugal unions, Olivas argument would imply no State should have the right to refuse recognition to same-sex couples: an extreme standpoint, that goes even further than notoriously liberal Human Rights Courts across the world.
That a Dominican friar should promote such scandalous propositions is in itself a sign of the times.
Fr. Adriano Oliva is works as a researcher for the State-run CNRS in France (National Center for Scientific Research) at the Laboratory of Monotheistic studies. But he is also a doctor in theology, a historian of medieval doctrines, and president of the Leonine Commission founded by Pope Leo XIII in Paris in 1880 in order to publish or republish critical editions of St Thomas Aquinas work and to restore his golden wisdom.
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