When Francis says that the Church is too focused on abortion, gays, and birth control instead of problems like poverty he is doing more than it seems. Birth control is settled for most Catholics. Homosexuality has never in itself been a problem, the issue being between objective sin and personal responsibility. But abortion is another matter. If abortion at any stage is murder than the bishops were right in forcefully opposing it. To downplay abortion now means that he is willing that somewhere down the road the entire question should be reexamined sans the current sloganeering. The church likes to quote Aquinas when it suits its notions but he did not consider abortion murder. He postulated three souls: the vegetative, animal, and immortal human. He did not think a foetus was human until near birth even though it resembled an infant earlier. His problem with early abortion was that it was a form of birth control and since to him life is better than nonlife birth control was frustrating God’s plan to make lots of people. That is a poor argument in today’s overpopulated world for the commandment to increase vand multiple has clearly been fulfilled. Francis doesn’t want his church saying that it is better that children be born in disease and starvation than not be born at all. He has opened a back door to reexamine the issue as not always being one of murder, and in so doing gotten the Church out of the box that it has put itself into. This conversation may not start for awhile but he has made it possible by downplaying the sin issue here in favor of more immediate sin issues like poverty and effective slavery, and all the inhuman treatment that follows from them.

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