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Post: 12.281 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
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When a pope, any pope, re-opens an already settled article of Church discipline - like the ban on communion for unqualified remarried divorcees who, by definition, live in a chronic state of sin - to be decided on the case-by-case 'discernment' of the bishop or priest responsible for the spiritual direction of such couples, then he is openly saying "do as you think best'. And of course, different individuals will do differently because they do not all think alike. What could be more obviously divisive?
JMB/PF's deliberate equivocal language on this issue in Amoris laetitia clearly causes such a split. Bishops and priests who think like him will go the way of maximum leniency, aka pastoral mercy in the Bergoglian lexicon, and allow communion for all such couples, not just on a case-by-case basis.
Orthodox bishops and priests, like Archbishop Chaput of Pennsylvania, will clearly lay down guidelines interpreting the casuistic language of AL in the most most genuinely charitable way, i.e., in the light of the Magisterium, based on Scripture and Tradition, that has been in force in the Church and has not been abrogated formally in any way.
In other words, for orthodox Catholics, i.e. correct-thinking Catholics, the Magisterium on the communion ban for remarried divorcees stands as John Paul II and Benedict XVI reaffirmed it - clearly and unequivocally - in Familiaris consortio and Sacramentum caritatis, respectively.
If Jorge Bergoglio does not have the courage to contradict them just as clearly and unequivocally in a papal document - even if he does so in so many other statements and actions - then he compounds with cowardice the fact that he has been derelict to his duties as Pope:
1) To uphold and defend the deposit of faith handed down to him to preserve and not to tamper with
2) To confirm his brothers in the faith - because the opposite of confirming is to confuse them continually, on this and other matters of faith and morals as this pope does
3) To preserve the unity of the Church - which he openly undermines by promulgating an obviously divisive document, whatever its 'technical status' is (formal or informal, magisterial or not).
In this context, the following article in the Wall Street Journal, now the widest circulated newspaper in the USA, is long overdue. Like DUH!!!
Pope’s teaching on divorce divides bishops
Elliptical language leaves meaning open to interpretation,
with dioceses going divergent ways
[And when has this happened in the Church except during the Arian crisis?]
By FRANCIS X. ROCCA
July 10, 2016
ROME — Conservative and liberal prelates in the Catholic Church have put forth sharply different readings of Pope Francis’s teaching on divorce[among Catholics] — a situation complicated by the pontiff’s own ambiguity.
In April, Pope Francis published “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), which responded to a turbulent meeting of bishops on family issues by urging a more lenient approach to divorced Catholics, in effect encouraging priests to grant some of those who remarry Holy Communion.
Instead of settling the issue, the pope has opened the door to divergent interpretations as local bishops implement the document. Conservatives argue that nothing has changed while liberals see more flexibility — with broader implications for teachings on sexual morality.
On July 1, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia published guidelines for his archdiocese, the sixth largest in the U.S., on how to carry out the teachings.
The archbishop, a leading conservative at last October’s Vatican synod, reaffirmed the traditional rule that divorced Catholics who remarry without getting an annulment may not receive Communion — unless they abstain from sex with their new spouses, since the church considers such relations adulterous.
Archbishop Chaput said that the pope’s own words showed that he had no intention of changing this teaching. [Tactful but simply untrue!]
The reaction from liberal critics was severe, with even the mayor of Philadelphia tweeting that “Chaput’s actions are not Christian.”
Then last week, a Vatican-supervised theological journal published an interview with Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, a leading liberal at the family synod. The cardinal said Pope Francis had reinterpreted the church’s teaching to mean that some Catholics in an “objective situation of sin,” including remarried divorcées, may receive Communion.
A central issue is the pope’s characteristically indirect language. In AL, he didn’t explicitly amend the existing rule. To have done so would have been awkward, since Pope Francis often stresses the importance of consultation with his fellow bishops and the family synod didn’t endorse any change.
But in a news conference, the pope said that his document had opened new possibilities of access to the sacraments for remarried divorcées.
Declining to be more specific, he referred reporters to a commentary by Cardinal Schönborn. [How much more specific can he be? He admits he has opened new possibilities which were not there before - in his questionable re-opening of an issue, about which his two immediate predecessors had written and spoken unequivocally, and clearly contradicting the majority sense of the two family synods he convoked in 2014 and 2015. He already warned us at the end of the 2015 synod that in the end, it is only he who decides. Collegial schmolleggial! Synod schmynod!]
The cardinal, in last week’s interview, likewise refused to be specific, saying “there is no general norm that can cover all the particular cases,” and that the matter is ultimately one of “individual discernment.” [In other words, the communion ban does not hold up at all, because individual bishops or priests can discern that it should not apply. No casuistry can overcome that simple logic. And it's not as if it were more obvious than the black pants under his white cassock that JMB really wants to give communion to everyone, sinners repentant or unrepentant, Catholics or non-Catholics - it doesn't matter to him.]
In other words, the change isn’t so much a looser rule as a loosening of the very idea of rules. [That's a tactful way of saying that the change consists, in short, of enabling mass sacramental sacrilege.]
Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan has gone as far as any bishop in challenging the papal document, which he wrote contains “objectively erroneous expressions” that pose “real spiritual danger.”
Others, including U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, have chosen to play down AL as a “personal reflection of the pope,” rather than authoritative teaching.
But conservatives who object to changing tradition also generally tend to be the most reluctant to oppose a pope.
“The people who traditionally have been defenders of papal authority for the last 50 years suddenly find themselves out of step with the pope, and that’s a very strange situation,” says the Rev. Gerald Murray, pastor of Holy Family Church in New York and a frequent commentator on EWTN Catholic television. [Because the papal authority they defended - that we defended and continue to defend - is that which is exercised in the defense of the deposit of faith, not in changing it underhandedly; in confirming the world's 1.2 billion Catholics in their faith, not confusing them serially; and in promoting Catholic unity, where JMB directly and actively foments division.]
According to the Rev. Thomas Reese, senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, Pope Francis is untroubled by the debate.
“He believes that it is up to the local bishop to look at the concrete situation in his diocese and make the pastoral judgment about what is possible,” Father Reese says. “We may have 10 or 20 years of this situation where different bishops are doing it differently in different places but I think there will come about a consensus on where we go.” [And Reese finds nothing wrong in that "different bishops are doing it differently in different places" in what is supposed to be the Catholic i.e. universal Church, not a collection of dioceses each doing as they please! It's indicative of how the Bergoglian rah-rah boys (and girls) are so entangled in the ideological biases they share with this pope that they do not even realize the import of what they are saying.]
Conservatives like Father Murray find such a situation untenable.
“This is an exploding land mine and I regret that it’s going to be a continual fight until it’s changed back to the old discipline,” he says. “The unity of the church’s pastoral ministry is affected severely when you have contrasting practices in different places.”
During the family synod, some bishops spoke privately of the danger of a schism over the issue, similar to the looming split in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality.
“There may not be a schism in the sense of a rejection of papal authority, but there is going to be a debate in the church about the directions in which the pope is taking the church and whether we should go along or we should resist,” said Father Murray.
The only schism right now is the undeclared and well-camouflaged but very real de facto schism of the church of Bergoglio from the one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. Except that unfortunately, that he was legitimately elected the leader of the Catholic Church, and can therefore carry off everything he does to advance the church of Bergoglio, as efforts in behalf of the Catholic Church, when what he's really trying to achieve is a wreckovation of the Church established by Christ.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/07/2016 23:41] |