A Relentless Drive to Accommodate Sexual Immorality in the Church But nothing exceeds the arrogance and audacity with which you have relentlessly pursued the imposition upon the Church universal of the same evil practice you authorized as Archbishop of Buenos Aires: the sacrilegious administration of the Blessed Sacrament to people living in adulterous “second marriages” or cohabiting without even the benefit of a civil ceremony. From almost the moment of your election you have promoted the “Kasper proposal”—rejected repeatedly by the Vatican under John Paul II. Cardinal Walter Kasper, an arch-liberal even among the liberal German hierarchy, had long argued for the admission of divorced and “remarried” persons to Holy Communion in “certain cases” according to a bogus “penitential path” that would admit them to the Sacrament while they continue their adulterous sexual relations. Kasper belonged to the “St. Gallen group” that lobbied for your election, and you royally rewarded his persistence in error, with the press happily dubbing him “the Pope’s theologian.” It seems you have little regard for sacramental marriage as an objective fact as opposed to what people subjectively feel about the status of immoral relationships the Church can never recognize as matrimony. In remarks which alone will discredit your bizarre pontificate until the end of time, you declared that “the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null” whereas certain people cohabiting without marriage can have “a true marriage” because of their “fidelity.” Are these remarks perhaps a reflection of your divorced and “remarried” sister and cohabiting nephew? Your preposterous opinion—one of the many you have expressed since your election—provoked worldwide protest on the part of the faithful. In an effort to minimize the scandal, the Vatican’s “official transcript” altered your words from “great majority of our sacramental marriages” to “a part of our sacramental marriages” but left intact your disgraceful approbation of immoral cohabitation as “true marriage.” Nor do you seem concerned about the sacrilege involved in public adulterers and cohabiters receiving the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. As you told the woman in Argentina to whom you gave “permission” on the telephone to receive Communion while living in adultery with a divorced man: “A little bread and wine does no harm.” You have never denied the woman’s account, and it would only be consistent with your refusal to kneel at the Consecration or before the exposed Blessed Sacrament even though you have no difficulty kneeling to kiss the feet of Muslims during your grotesque parody of the traditional Holy Thursday mandatum, which you have abandoned. It would also comport with your remarks to a Lutheran woman, in the Lutheran church you attended on a Sunday, that the dogma of transubstantiation is a mere “interpretation,” that “life is bigger than explanations and interpretations, and that she should “talk to the Lord” about whether to receive Communion in a Catholic Church—which she later did following your evident encouragement. In line with your scant regard for sacramental marriage is your precipitous and secretive “reform” of the annulment process, which you foisted upon the Church without consulting any of the competent Vatican dicasteries. Your Motu Proprio Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus erects the framework for a veritable worldwide annulment mill with a “fast-track” procedure and nebulous new grounds for expedited annulment proceedings. As the head of your clandestinely contrived reform later explained, your express intention is to promote among the bishops “a ‘conversion’, a change of mentality which convinces and sustains them in following the invitation of Christ, present in their brother, the Bishop of Rome, to pass from the restricted number of a few thousand annulments to that immeasurable [number] of unfortunates who might have a declaration of nullity…” Thus does “the Bishop of Rome” demand from his fellow bishops a vast increase in the number of annulments! A distinguished Catholic journalist later reported on the emergence of a seven-page dossier in which curial officials “juridically ‘picked apart’ the Pope’s motu proprio… accuse the Holy Father of giving up an important dogma, and assert that he has introduced de facto ‘Catholic divorce.’” These officials deplored what this journalist describes as “an ecclesialized ‘Führerprinzip,’ ruling from the top down, by decree and without any consultation or any checks.” The same officials fear that “the motu proprio will lead to a flood of annulments and that from now on, couples would be able to simply exit their Catholic marriage without a problem.” They are “‘beside themselves’ and feel obligated to ‘speak up’…” But you are nothing if not consistent in pursuing your aims. Early in your pontificate, during one of the in-flight press conferences at which you have first revealed your plans, you stated: “The Orthodox follow the theology of economy, as they call it, and they give a second chance of marriage [sic], they allow it. I believe that this problem must be studied.” For you, the lack of any “second chance of marriage” in the Catholic Church is a problem to be studied. You have clearly spent the past three-and-a-half years contriving to impose on the Church something approximating the Orthodox practice. A distinguished canonist who is a consultant to the Apostolic Signatura has warned that as result of your reckless disregard of the reality of sacramental marriage: a crisis (in the Greek sense of that word) over marriage is unfolding in the Church, and it is a crisis that will, I suggest, come to a head over matrimonial discipline and law…. I think the marriage crisis that he [Francis] is occasioning is going to come down to whether Church teaching on marriage, which everyone professes to honor, will be concretely and effectively protected in Church law, or, whether the canonical categories treating marriage doctrine become so distorted (or simply disregarded) as essentially to abandon marriage and married life to the realm of personal opinion and individual conscience. . (cont'd)
Amoris Laetita: the Real Motive for the Sham Synod That crisis reached its peak following the conclusion of your disastrous “Synod on the Family.” Although you manipulated this event from beginning to end to obtain the result you desired—Holy Communion for public adulterers in “certain cases”—it fell short of your expectations because of opposition from the conservative Synod Fathers youdemagogically denounced as having “closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families.” In a brutal abuse of rhetoric, you likened your orthodox episcopal opponents to the Pharisees, who practiced divorce and “remarriage” according to the Mosaic dispensation. These were the very bishops who defended the teaching of Christ against the Pharisees—and your own designs! Indeed, you seem intent on reviving a Pharisaical acceptance of divorce by way of a “neo-Mosaic practice.” A renowned Catholic journalist known for his moderate approach to analysis of Church affairs protested your reprehensible behavior: “For a pope to criticize those who remain faithful to that tradition, and characterize them as somehow unmerciful and as aligning themselves with hard-hearted Pharisees against the merciful Jesus is bizarre.” In the end, the “synodal journey” you extolled was revealed as nothing but a sham concealing the foregone conclusion of your appalling “Apostolic Exhortation,” Amoris Latetita. Therein your ghostwriters, principally in Chapter Eight, employ artful ambiguity to open wide the door to Holy Communion for public adulterers by reducing the natural law forbidding adultery to a “general rule” to which there can be exceptions for people who “have great difficulty in understanding ‘its inherent values’” or are living “in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently… (¶¶ 2, 301, 304)” Amoris is a transparent attempt to smuggle a mitigated form of situation ethics into matters of sexual morality, as if the error could be thus confined. Your evident obsession with legitimating Holy Communion for public adulterers has led you to defy the constant moral teaching and intrinsically related sacramental discipline of the Church, affirmed by both of your immediatepredecessors. That discipline is based on the teaching of Our Lord Himself on the indissolubility of marriage as well as the teaching of Saint Paul on the divine punishment due to the unworthy reception of Holy Communion. To quote John Paul II in this regard: However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist. Besides this, there is another special pastoral reason: if these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church's teaching about the indissolubility of marriage. Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the Covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage. This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children's upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they “take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.” [Familiaris consortio, n. 84] You have ignored the worldwide pleas of priests, theologians and moral philosophers, Catholic associations and journalists, and even a few courageous prelates among an otherwise silent hierarchy, to retract or “clarify” the tendentious ambiguities and outright errors of Amoris, particularly in Chapter Eight. (cont'd)
A Grave Moral Error Now Explicitly Approved And now, moving beyond a devious use of ambiguity, you have authorized explicitly behind the scenes what you have condoned ambiguously in public. The scheme was brought to light with the leaking of your “confidential” letter to the bishops of the pastoral region of Buenos Aires—where, as Archbishop, you had already authorized mass sacrilege in the villas (slums). In this letter you praise the bishops’ document on “Basic Criteria for the Application of Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia”—as if there were some duty to “apply” the document so as to produce a change in the Church’s bimillenial sacramental discipline. You write: “The document is very good and completely explains the meaning of chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations.” Is it a coincidence that this document comes from the very archdiocese where, as Archbishop, you had long since authorized the admission of public adulterers and cohabiters to Holy Communion? What was only clearly implied before is now made explicit, and those who insisted Amoris changes nothing have been made to look like fools. The document you now praise as the only correct interpretation of Amoris radically undermines the doctrine and practice of the Church your predecessors defended. In the first place, it reduces to an “option” the moral imperative that divorced and “remarried” couples “live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.” According to the bishops of Buenos Aires—with your approval—it is merely “possible to propose that they make the effort of living in continence. Amoris Laetitia does not ignore the difficulties of thisoption.” As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared definitively only 18 years ago during the reign of the very Pope you canonized: “if the prior marriage of two divorced and remarried members of the faithful was valid, under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception.” This is the constant teaching of the Catholic Church for two millennia. Moreover, no parish priest or even a bishop has the power to honor in the so-called “internal forum” the claim of one living in adultery that his “conscience” tells him that his sacramental marriage was really invalid because, as the CDF further admonished, “marriage has a fundamental public ecclesial character and the axiom applies that nemo iudex in propria causa (no one is judge in his own case), marital cases must be resolved in the external forum. If divorced and remarried members of the faithful believe that their prior marriage was invalid, they are thereby obligated to appeal to the competent marriage tribunal so that the question will be examined objectively and under all available juridical possibilities.” Having reduced an exceptionless moral norm rooted in divine revelation to an option, the bishops of Buenos Aires, citing Amoris as their only authority in 2,000 years of Church teaching, next declare: “In other, more complex circumstances, and when it is not possible to obtain a declaration of nullity, the aforementioned option may not, in fact, befeasible.” A universal moral norm is thus relegated to the category of a mere guideline to be disregarded if a local priest deems it “unfeasible” in certain undefined “complex circumstances.” What exactly are these “complex circumstances” and what does “complexity” have to do with exceptionless moral norms founded on revelation? Finally, the bishops reach the disastrous conclusion you have contrived to impose upon the Church from the beginning of the “synodal journey”: Nonetheless, it is equally possible to undertake a journey of discernment. If one arrives at the recognition that, in a particular case, there are limitations that diminish responsibility and culpability (cf. 301-302), particularly when a person judges that he would fall into a subsequent fault by damaging the children of the new union, Amoris Laetitia opens up the possibility of access to the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist (cf. notes 336 and 351). These in turn dispose the person to continue maturing and growing with the aid of grace. With your praise and approbation, the bishops of Buenos Aires declare for the first time in Church history that an ill-defined class of people living in adultery may be absolved and receive Holy Communion while remaining in that state. The consequences are catastrophic.
“Amoris Laetitia” as Positive Call to Holiness – More L. Melina and JPII PUBLISHED ON May 24, 2016 It is important to highlight the insight of Livio Melina concerning the novelty of “Amoris Laetitia,” that being the vocation of the family to holiness, not merely moral rectitude. It certainly is moral rectitude. But, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the command not to commit adultery is upgraded to “anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already commite adultery with her in his heart (Matt. 5, 27-28). The document is clearly a turn to the spouses as subjects, but not merely to indicate how culpability of sin is diminished because of a defect in understanding or full consent of will, etc. Rather, the main thrust of the exhortation in its turn to the subject is not about the business of diminishing culpability in evil, but rather increasing voluntariness in the self-gift (as not even to look) which has a divine Trinitarian and Christological character. In a word, how to love each with other more and more self-giving. Notice that the body of the human person has a sacramental character in that its meaning is “gift.” “Gift,” it must be remembered is the characteristic of the divine Persons as Father, Son and Spirit, i. e. of relationality. The Father is the pure act of engendering son, Son is the pure act of obeying and glorifying Father, Spirit is the personification of the mutual self-gift of the two. Hence, human/bodily sexuality has it prototype in the self-gift of Christ on the Cross for His Spouse the Church. Hence, human sexuality is sacramental as the imaging enfleshed communication of Love. And, as such, is the primordial sacrament. The marriage bond is the very enfleshed person of the spouses as gifts to each other. That is why there was no divorce “from the beginning” since it goes counter to the very meaning of the man and woman as persons. I am ripping through these concepts without the due penetration and need for paused consideration by you. For that, I would recommend daily spiritual reading (10-15 minutes per day) on the Theology of the Body (TOB) from July 28, 1982 to July 4,1984. Get help from Christopher West who understands it well and puts it into our kind of English and thought pattern. Chapter 4 of AL is the asceticism of living out this sanctifying dimension. Livio Melina: “What then is new in chapter eight? It is not the newness of a change in doctrine or in discipline. It lies in the merciful pastoral viewpoint of Pope Francis: in his desire to bring the Gospel to those who are estranged, doing so by following a logic of progressive integration. The exhortation points out that there can be circumstances in which those who objectively live in a state of sin, may not be subjectively guilty because of ignorance, fear, disordered affections or other reasons, which moral tradition has always recognized and the Catechism of the Catholic Church mentions in no. 1735. This is important to keep in mind: it means that we ought not to judge or condemn these persons, but rather be merciful and patient with them, as God the Father is with each one of us. We need to help each person find the path to convert from sin and grow in charity. While Amoris Laetitia states that it is impossible to declare that a person is in mortal sin without taking into account personal responsibility, which may be attenuated or even lacking (no. 301), this does not take away the need to make clear that, despite everything, we are dealing here with an objective state of sin (cf. no. 305). A new pastoral perspective for the Church But then, once we have excluded casuistic and tendentious interpretations, what does the Holy Father really want to tell us with this text? Here is the simple and decisive answer: he wants to announce a new way of evangelizing the family and invite everyone, in whatever situation they might find themselves, to undertake this journey: “Let us make this journey as families, let us keep walking together!” (no. 325) He himself suggested this key for interpretation in his interview when returning from the Holy Land in May 2014, when he said that the key question that inspired him to convoke the synod was not a matter of casuistry, but the urgency to proclaim “what Christ brings to the family.” [ Himself (as in Exodus 33)]. In his exhortation, the Holy Father points out that unfortunately in our Western societies, even among many baptized persons, marriage is no longer perceived as good news. This is the true pastoral problem that the apostolic exhortation addresses in a courageous way. The Pope wants to open up a new path to proclaim the good news of marriage and the family in the life of the Church. In order to understand this correctly, we need to realize that the Pope places at the center of his meditation the hymn to charity found in 1 Cor 13 (chapter IV), in which the apostle St. Paul speaks about charity as a “more excellent way.” Thereby the Pope shows that for him love is an ever new path to travel in complete fidelity to God’s plan for human love. God’s design for human love naturally includes the fundamental dimensions that we find in St. John Paul II’s theology of the body and that have been taken up and highlighted by Pope Francis in the current document (cf. no. 150 ff): sexual differences, indissoluble and faithful unity, and openness to life. Regarding this path of love, we highlight below several decisive elements in Amoris Laetitia that have great value for pastoral renewal. The centrality of the educational question, teaching people that matrimony is a vocation to love (chapter VII). The exhortation frequently speaks about a “journey,” “history,” “narration.” These are terms that show the importance of freedom in time: the Church not only “goes out” and draws close to people, embracing them as they are, but she makes herself their traveling companion, meeting them where they are and helping them to reach an attainable goal. Facing affective illiteracy and the frailty of freedom when it comes to making demanding and irrevocable decisions (“forever”), the answer can only be a renewed commitment to formation in the family, the Church and social groups. Clear teaching on conjugal love and fruitfulness stemming from the encyclical Humanae Vitae. We are asked once again take up the encyclical of Paul VI (the 50th anniversary of this document will be celebrated in 2018), finding there the Church’s teaching on how to bring the Gospel’s light to bear on sexual intimacy. It is a light that is very much needed in a culture that, after the sexual revolution, has forgotten the language of the body and sexuality (no. 222). This truly prophetic magisterium corresponds perfectly to the perspective of an integral human ecology. The recognition of the pastoral importance of the family in the Church. The family is not principally a pastoral problem among many other problems that need to be resolved. Rather it is the foremost means for evangelization in a more “family-based” Church, a Church that has the profile of the “family of God.” We need to set up a “virtuous circle and synergy” between the Church and the family. Just as the family is a “small domestic church,” so too the Church at large ought to have the features of “the family of God” (nos. 86-87), and these aspects should be lived in practice. The sacramental character of Christian life. Christianity is based on an historical event that affects us in the flesh and transforms our flesh. Pastoral plans drawn up over a table will not save us, and still less those that seek to adapt Christian morality to the mentality of a Western world in a state of crisis. That is why we need to overcome any tendency to view human love as merely emotional or conventionally contractual, and recover the meaning of marriage as the vocational “hinge” of Christian life, for those called to it. To weaken matrimony in its constitutive demands would mean to lose, along with the ontological realism of the sacraments, the divine gift that sustains the Church’s life. Rising above a logical casuistry, there comes into view the expansive positive horizon that Pope Francis’ exhortation opens up for the Church’s mission, by emphasizing the educational question as the decisive pastoral question. The Pontifical John Paul II Institute feels a special responsibility here, because of the mission it has received and its extensive experience in the theological and pastoral fields. https://actingpersonblog.wordpress....-call-to-holiness-more-l-melina-and-jpii-tob/
This is worth a repeat. And now, moving beyond a devious use of ambiguity, you have authorized explicitly behind the scenes what you have condoned ambiguously in public. The scheme was brought to light with the leaking of your “confidential” letter to the bishops of the pastoral region of Buenos Aires—where, as Archbishop, you had already authorized mass sacrilege in the villas (slums). In this letter you praise the bishops’ document on “Basic Criteria for the Application of Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia”—as if there were some duty to “apply” the document so as to produce a change in the Church’s bimillenial sacramental discipline. You write: “The document is very good and completely explains the meaning of chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations.” Is it a coincidence that this document comes from the very archdiocese where, as Archbishop, you had long since authorized the admission of public adulterers and cohabiters to Holy Communion? What was only clearly implied before is now made explicit, and those who insisted Amoris changes nothing have been made to look like fools. The document you now praise as the only correct interpretation of Amoris radically undermines the doctrine and practice of the Church your predecessors defended. In the first place, it reduces to an “option” the moral imperative that divorced and “remarried” couples “live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.” According to the bishops of Buenos Aires—with your approval—it is merely “possible to propose that they make the effort of living in continence. Amoris Laetitia does not ignore the difficulties of thisoption.” As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared definitively only 18 years ago during the reign of the very Pope you canonized: “if the prior marriage of two divorced and remarried members of the faithful was valid, under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception.” This is the constant teaching of the Catholic Church for two millennia. Moreover, no parish priest or even a bishop has the power to honor in the so-called “internal forum” the claim of one living in adultery that his “conscience” tells him that his sacramental marriage was really invalid because, as the CDF further admonished, “marriage has a fundamental public ecclesial character and the axiom applies that nemo iudex in propria causa (no one is judge in his own case), marital cases must be resolved in the external forum. If divorced and remarried members of the faithful believe that their prior marriage was invalid, they are thereby obligated to appeal to the competent marriage tribunal so that the question will be examined objectively and under all available juridical possibilities.” Having reduced an exceptionless moral norm rooted in divine revelation to an option, the bishops of Buenos Aires, citing Amoris as their only authority in 2,000 years of Church teaching, next declare: “In other, more complex circumstances, and when it is not possible to obtain a declaration of nullity, the aforementioned option may not, in fact, befeasible.” A universal moral norm is thus relegated to the category of a mere guideline to be disregarded if a local priest deems it “unfeasible” in certain undefined “complex circumstances.” What exactly are these “complex circumstances” and what does “complexity” have to do with exceptionless moral norms founded on revelation? Finally, the bishops reach the disastrous conclusion you have contrived to impose upon the Church from the beginning of the “synodal journey”: Nonetheless, it is equally possible to undertake a journey of discernment. If one arrives at the recognition that, in a particular case, there are limitations that diminish responsibility and culpability (cf. 301-302), particularly when a person judges that he would fall into a subsequent fault by damaging the children of the new union, Amoris Laetitia opens up the possibility of access to the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist (cf. notes 336 and 351). These in turn dispose the person to continue maturing and growing with the aid of grace. With your praise and approbation, the bishops of Buenos Aires declare for the first time in Church history that an ill-defined class of people living in adultery may be absolved and receive Holy Communion while remaining in that state. The consequences are catastrophic
Would it not be better to state what you think is wrong with the content posted, rather than accuse Mac like that?
Apparently since I talk with you .... I think this is what Pope Francis means when he encourages 'Encounter' We will meet in the middle?
I could have said exactly the same thing to Mac after his two posts above which were a 'response' to my post which was appreciative of AL.
That is true Mac, which is so scary! But at the moment we have a good Holy Pope who is trying to bring Gods Mercy to the world so we are so lucky at the moment! I think that when he is gone, things will get really bad and we will be wanting him back at the helm.!
They aren't alone any more, thankfully. It's no longer just 3 or 4 MOG posters that can be marginalized and shouted down. "What was only clearly implied before is now made explicit, and those who insistedAmoris changes nothing have been made to look like fools."
Well at least Pope Francis was clear in his interview on the plane that Amoris did change things in introducing new possibilities. What hasn't changed is fundamental doctrine, despite all the claims that it has. But our understanding of doctrine is certainly changing also and that is where disagreements will continue. Thank God that He gave us a Church guided by Peter!
