Austin Ruse of the Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam) says the Catholic Church's Jubilee Year is a celebration that is probably foreign to most Protestants.
"The Jubilee comes around every 25 years, and it has to do with indulgences," he explains. "They opened the bronze doors at Saint Peter's Cathedral in Rome, and if you walk through the bronze doors, you get an indulgence, which is essentially time off in purgatory."
He says Catholics from around the world make pilgrimages to Rome to walk through the bronze doors, and for the first time in the church's history, Pope Francis has invited LGBTQ Catholics to participate.
"I think that it is a confusing thing to say that there's going to be a special pilgrimage day during the Jubilee Year to Saint Peter's, because it puts in people's minds that acting out in a homosexual way is acceptable to the church, which it's not," Ruse states.
Noting the Vatican's move last year to allow priests to bless same-sex couples, he says Pope Francis has often given mixed messages about the LGBT community and the Catholic Church, but the next pope might be different.
"He's appointing a lot of new cardinals who would then vote on the next pope, and one of his big things is appointing cardinals from what he called the peripheries," the C-Fam spokesman reports.
That is African and Third World countries that are overwhelmingly conservative.
"It's a fairly good shot that the next pope might not be as confusing as this pope sometimes is," Ruse reiterates.
The Jubilee Year begins on December 24, 2024 and ends on January 6, 2026.
