The Pope and the Roman View of Sin
The Pope has again made controversial remarks about homosexuality. He stated to journalists that the Roman Catholic Church should apologise to sodomites for the way it has treated them. He went on to say that the Church should seek forgiveness from other people it had marginalised, namely, women, the poor and children forced into labour. This comment is in line with his earlier statement that he was not going to sit in judgement upon priests with homosexual inclinations.
While his remarks seem to have angered some conservative Romanists for making comments that are ambiguous on morality, his position is still in line with the Romanist conception of sin, which holds that the underlying corruption of nature in man is not properly sin until it breaks forth into actual transgression. This erroneous teaching is most pernicious, not least since it leads to a shallow view of human sinfulness and, consequently, to a lesser sense of need for salvation by grace alone. The very inclination to sin (whatever sin it may be) is not only the root of sin but is sin, as Christ taught in Matthew 15:18-20.
AWM