Marking what could be a significant change in the Catholic Church’s official stance on homosexuality, Pope Francis said Sunday, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Here are some notable ways the Church’s views on homosexuality have evolved over the years:
Creation: God issues strict command for all of mankind to have irrational, destructive hatred for one another
33-2013: A few gay popes, presumably
761: The Catholic Church declares the one-time ‘Year of You,’ in which it encourages the world’s Catholics to just smile, be themselves, and overall have a blast, regardless of whom they love
1349: Mass population loss due to the Black Death forces the Church to temporarily allow gay priests, leper priests, boy priests, and horse priests
1825: Group of men who abstain from female contact in favor of spending their entire lives in the intimate company of other men once again insist that other people not do that
1870: Vatican affirms the doctrine of papal infallibility, which states that every pope is free to basically say or do whatever they want based on the current political climate
1924: Pope Pius XI famously declares that he would rather see the Church gradually lose influence and become virtually irrelevant in the lives of the world’s Catholics than have it accept homosexuality
1986: Pope John Paul II says he thinks homosexuality is a mortal sin; he’ll be a saint soon
2005: Archbishop Ennio Antonelli sees Pope Benedict XVI making out with some guy at a party and decides to just keep it to himself
2248: The largely marginalized and unpopular Catholic Church accepts that homosexuality is not a sin and gay and straight people alike are all God’s creations
