Pope Francis has fired conservative Texan bishop Joseph Strickland over a series of attacks on the Pope’s attempts to update the Church’s position on social matters and inclusion, including on abortion, transgender rights and same-sex marriage, the BBC reports.
Bishop Strickland has been seen as a leading voice in a branch of US Catholicism that is opposed to the Pope’s reforms.
Pope Francis recently spoke of the ‘backwardness’ of some US Catholic church leaders.
Such backwardness was ‘useless’, he said, adding: ‘Doing this you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In other words, ideologies replace faith.’
The BBC reports that, on Thursday, the Vatican announced that transgender people could be baptised in the Catholic Church, as long as doing so did not cause scandal or ‘confusion’.
In October, the Pope suggested that the Church would be open to bless same-sex couples, telling a group of cardinals that ‘we cannot be judges who only deny, reject and exclude’.
Bishop Strickland, however, has warned that many ‘basic truths’ of Catholic teaching were being challenged, including what he called attempts to ‘undermine’ marriage ‘as instituted by God’ being only between a man and a woman.
He criticised as ‘disordered’ the attempts of those who ‘reject their undeniable biological God-given identity’.