When Will the Catholic Church Perform Gay Marriages?

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

It's inevitable that homosexual marriages will be legal in every state by 2020. I'll say 2025 at the very latest, but it seems things have been moving quite fast this year thanks to the courts.

Curious, when, if ever, y'all expect the Church's stance to change on this.

From what I've read about its philosophy on contraception and even in vitro fertilization, this seems like an enormous mountain to overcome even though very few practicing Catholics even follow through on the first tenet.

However, an even more valid precedent may be that the Church allows the infertile to get married so that could extend to this. That seems much more unlikely, but that seems like the most logical thing they can use to justify a change. Does anyone know of anything else? Maybe strengthening of family unit but I don't know if that has as much to do with morals.

Anyone have any thoughts? I'm not as up to date on religious matters as I should be (too much collectivism!), so I'm open to hearing arguments.

I'm sure a lot of it has to do who is at the top of the hierarchy, and who knows how often the Pope is going to change...so just take a guess in that case.

I'll say 2048, but never wouldn't surprise me. Opinion shifts in the rest of the world will be critical too. Or our inevitably increasingly authoritarian government could force the Church to perform all desired marriages though I'd think they'd find a way around that.

[TJ in Oregon]

Never (at least not on the institutional level; I'm sure some priest somewhere has done it already though). The Church's teachings are not subject to popular vote or judicial decisions; nor is the United States particularly important. If those in the Church hierarchy are Catholic (ie. that they believe in the Catholic Church's teachings), they cannot then turn around and change said teachings. It is true that the circumstances of society when an act is committed may have some bearing on whether or not it is wrong; ie. charging interest in Jesus's time was indeed usury but it was usury because of the way it was carried out not because charging interest is intrinsically evil itself. Given the purpose of sex as a marital act and the entire idea of a sexual relationship pointing toward that end, the Church's teachings on homosexual sex acts and gay marriage are settled. Matters of prudence, disciplines of the Church, and other rites as such can change to meet the needs of modern society but the truth cannot for Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb 13:8).

On this point, here's the translated text of Pope Francis's famous "Who am I to judge" response on the plane:

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His response, interestingly, is that the existence a lobby, for any purpose, is the problem. The problem is less homosexuality, or any other particular change people want to make to the Church's teachings, but that they want to make a change at all.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Yeah, I just don't see it happening.  The greatest degree of concession I can see the Catholic Church making would be the possibility of having a non-marriage ceremony of commitment or the like, much as it practically has turned annulment into divorce in all but name.  But having anything other than a union of one man and one woman partake of the sacrament of matrimony is something that just isn't going to happen in the Catholic Church.