Most marriages today are invalid, Pope Francis suggests

With all due respect, "Little me", no one has suggested that The Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph were invalidly married.

Let us be as wise as serpents but as innocent as Doves.

http://taylormarshall.com/2011/04/joseph-and-mary-were-they-truly-married.html

 

Just responding to quote you provided (no link provided for context).

 

You just said it. I am frankly shocked at how many people on this forum quickly forget. We have had a Saint admonish the Roman Rota for years due to the ease of declarations of nullity. What say you on that?

It is NOT a given that artificial contraception nullifies a marriage. It is NOT required for deep theological understanding of what marriage really is about in order to have valid consent. With respect to the Monsignor who has been a champion of the pro-life cause, there are those - who have higher standing - who would disagree.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/e...ays-popes-exhortation-must-be-read-critically

Cardinal Burke - former head of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican Supreme Court:

"Has contemporary ignorance about the rules and goods of marriage reached such a level that many marriages are invalid?

I think that the confusion that is in the world, and now is also entering into the Church, has an influence on a person who is contemplating marriage. But I think also that we have to recall that the good of marriage is taught to us by nature itself, and so to say that, for instance, widespread divorce, sexual promiscuity and so forth condition people so that they cannot enter a valid marriage, is incorrect. The young person knows within his or her heart what marriage is, and is even helped in that by good preparation, and therefore even though in the society there are all sorts of pressures contrary to a marriage the young person can well choose marriage as it truly is. The only way to say a marriage is invalid is to show that a particular individual applied to his marriage consent the right to divorce or infidelity. In other words: in giving consent to marry a person reserved the right to divorce or reserved the right to have sexual relations with another partner."

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Let us stop this foolishness that marriage is complicated. People have been marrying for thousands of years. Let's keep it simple as you say, this is not That complicated...


Mark 10Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE)
Teaching about Divorce
10 And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again; and again, as his custom was, he taught them.

2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.” 5 But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,[a] 8 and the two shall become one.’[b] So they are no longer two but one.[c] 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
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Yes Andy, it reminds me too of how later down the track some non catholics or utterly lapsed catholics will suddenly show up to get their pre school child baptised because they want preferential entry in to their local neighbourhood Catholic school. This was the case with my neice. We did not discourage her, because we realise that it is wonderful that her daughter will end up baptised as a result (and educated in a Catholic school as a result, of which something good might come) but the only motive was that it is a good school and parents can see that the catholic school is a kinder gentler environment than the state run school, where the law of the jungle prevails, so they want their children in the Catholic school, and they will jump through the hoops to get them in there, though they would not be interested in attending Mass or anything to do with learning the Faith. It is also to do with the status symbol of the child wearing a uniform, here in this country. Its a form of snobbery and it has little or nothing to do with any Catholic sensibilities but I guess that may come later...

 

http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2606-the-rise-and-fall-of-pope-francis

The Rise and Fall of Pope Francis

Excerpt:
....

Conclusion: a Papal Assault on Holy Matrimony

Dr. Peters rightly discerns that with “the debacle of assertions of massive nullity supposedly plaguing Christian marriage still reverberating, something deeper may be emerging here…” The deeper problem, although Peters does not put it this way, is that we have a Pope who thinks the Church ought to conform itself to his personal view of the way things should be without regard to the teaching of all his predecessors or the Church’s bimillenial discipline.

Where marriage is concerned, Francis just feels (to quote Peters) that “most marriages are not marriage but lots of non-marriages are marriage.” Only this, Peters reasonably deduces, would explain Francis’s “annulment reform,” which is designed to dispense with all the canonical marriages he views as null, and his relentless push, culminating with AL, for the “pastoral integration” of Catholics living in “second marriages” that the Church, following Our Lord, must view as public adultery.

Francis, in short, has little concern for marriage as an objective fact as opposed to what people, Francis included, subjectively feel about the status of relationships the Church can never recognize as matrimony. The result, Peters concludes, is that thanks to Francis:

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 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. History has always favored the former; disaster lurks behind the latter….When even a commentator as reserved as Peters, who is hardly a “radical traditionalist,” reaches a conclusion of this magnitude, it should be obvious to all Catholics, traditionalist or not, that Francis poses an unprecedented threat to the integrity of the Church. And that concern was only heightened by his public admission, two days after the Lateran conference, to a group of students at Villa Nazareth University:​

Many times I find myself in a crisis with the faith. Sometimes I’ve even had the impudence to scold Jesus— “But why did you permit this?”—and even to doubt: “But is this the truth or is it a dream?”And this as a boy, as a seminarian, as a priest, as a religious and [with emphasis] as Pope…. A Christian who does not feel this sometimes, who does not enter into a crisis of faith, is missing something. He is a Christian who is content with a little worldliness, and so he goes ahead in life….

They tell me that in Chinese the word “crisis” is made with two ideograms: one ideogram “risk” the other “opportunity” [an urban legend Francis has cited before]. This is true, eh? When one enters into crisis—as Jesus said to Peter, the devil would put him in crisis, like one does with wheat…. there is always a danger, a risk—a risk not in a good sense—and an opportunity. This I have learned: you must not be afraid to enter into a crisis. It is a sign to go ahead, that you are not anchored to the bank of the river that opens to the sea, and go ahead…. [Note: Translation mine from the video, as the media quotations are sketchy and inaccurate.]
​

We have Pope who, before an audience of impressionable youth, thinks nothing of admitting to many crises of faith even as Pope, belittles Christians who have not had his experience of doubt, and views as an opportunity the devil trying to sift a soul like wheat. It seems impossible to believe, even after three years of this sort of thing—even after a half-century of revolution in the Church—that a Vicar of Christ could speak and act as Francis does. Putting aside all the nonsensical, false, and outright heterodox pronunciamentos of the former Archbishop Bergoglio since his election—so numerous they would fill a book—the past two weeks of eruptions alone are enough thoroughly to discredit this pontificate.

Con't

 

Con't

Indeed, if only to give Francis the benefit of the doubt concerning motive, which we must do, the issue of mental competency must be considered. There are signs that Francis inhabits a kind of dream world in which realities do not penetrate very well. Francis himself has boasted that “God is good to me, he has bestowed on me a healthy dose of unawareness. I just do what I have to do.” Perhaps there is a worsening clinical aspect to this dreamlike state.

One telling example of an alarming lack of awareness of reality is Francis’s defense of AL during the Lateran conference as “Thomistic from beginning to end” according to “the words of a great theologian who was Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Schönborn, who presented it…” Schönborn was never Secretary of the CDF but only a member, as even informed members of the laity know. Yet Francis had no clue. And this was the second time he cited Schönborn’s nonexistent credential in support of AL’s orthodoxy (will no one correct him?), the first being the inflight press conference during the return to Rome from Lesbos.

This is only one of a long series of gaffes, urban legends and factual blunders that pepper Francis’s rambling, often disjointed discourses in various places, all tending to indicate a significant impairment of mental acuity that would not be unexpected in anyone his age.

The situation has deteriorated to the point that even a Fox News commentator, following the remarks at the Lateran, has called upon Francis to resign—a form of protest, not a realistic expectation, to answer the anticipated the banal objection—in order to prevent further damage to the Church: "Once upon a time Catholics would have been stuck with a bad pope, but since Pope Emeritus Benedict opened the door for a pope resigning when he can no longer do his job, it is time for the faithful to look at Francis and ask— 'is this man able to lead the Holy Catholic Church?' At this point it is clear, Bergoglio has repeatedly proven himself unable to lead, and is doing incalculable damage to the Church that will take decades to heal.Pope Francis should resign, and Catholics should demand it, so the Church can begin recovering from the havoc his ill-advised and arrogant papacy has wrought."

Incredibly, with Francis we are witnessing the Humanae Vitae scenario in reverse: the laity defend Catholic teaching on marriage and procreation against the Pope! In this connection recall that Francis has also declared that the use of contraception to prevent transmission of diseases is licit as “the lesser of two evils” and that Father Lombardi insisted this is exactly what Francis meant to say.

We have reached a turning point in the history of the papacy, the Church and the world. For the first time in 2,000 years, the Church is afflicted by a Pope who has demonstrated beyond doubt that he simply cannot be trusted to speak the truth regarding matters of morality on which the eternal fate of countless souls depends. Quite the contrary, whatever his motive, of which God alone is the judge, Francis has shown that he can be expected to twist the Gospel, descend to demagoguery, and indulge in sophistry to advance a grandiose “revolution of tenderness.” And this is not even to mention all the other papal words and deeds that seem designed to reduce the Church to what Antonio Socci has called “a social assistant” to the New World Order.

But at least Francis is awakening more and more serious Catholics to the magnitude of the ecclesial crisis of which his pontificate, with its attack on the last bastion of morality itself, only represents the final and most dramatic stage. As Robert Spaemann has just written regarding the proper approach to criticism of a Pope: “Even in the Catholic Church there is a limit to what is bearable.” Francis has gone far beyond that limit, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the many commentators outside the traditionalist constituency, such as Dr. Peters and Phil Lawler, who now see this and are speaking the truth about our situation without regard to the impact it may have on their position or prestige within the ecclesial “mainstream.” Their witness will be critical in alerting the faithful at large in a way traditionalist sources alone cannot do, given the anti-traditionalist ideology so prevalent in the Church today.

Yet there are still Catholic commentators who cling to the truly fatuous argument that to disagree with Francis is to engage in “private judgment” à la Luther. But it is precisely Luther, the greatest enemy of the papacy the Church has ever encountered, whose life Francis intends to commemorate in Sweden during the run-up to the 500th anniversary of the “Reformation” that destroyed the unity of Christendom. As they would have it, however, one is guilty of Protestant “private judgment” if he objects that the Pope must not honor the originator of Protestant private judgment!

These ecclesial nominalists, obliterating any meaningful distinction between the exercise of authority and the objectivity of truth, confidently assert that the faithful are not competent to judge whether Francis has departed from sound orthodoxy or practice no matter what he says or does, and that even if he should appear to contradict all his predecessors in some matter it is impossible for us even to judge that there is a contradiction! For them, the Faith is like a mysterious black box in the Pope’s sole and exclusive possession, whose readings only he can decipher. And now the inscrutable black box declares that most marriages are not marriages, while many non-marriages are. The Church is being turned on her head, so they will obligingly stand on their heads in order to declare that she is still right side up. This willful suspension of reason, they tell us, is what it means to be a faithful Catholic. If Luther is in a place where laughter is possible, he must be laughing now. The very Catholics who think they are opposing “private judgment” have adopted the Protestant caricature of the inerrant oracular papacy that Saint Robert Bellarmine refuted during the Counter-Reformation.

We ought to leave these people to their intractable delusion. Their sophistry need occupy us no longer. The important task at hand is to speak the truth in union with every other Catholic who has the sense to demand that it be defended rather than belittled and subverted by the successor of Peter. Many have said that we deserve this awful pontificate on account of our own failings. Then let us make amends now, with prayer and Catholic action, that the madness descended upon us as a divine chastisement may, by a divine favor, be brought to an end at last.

 

Is this a Catholic website?

 

Most Catholics including friends and .members of my family are completely oblivious to any of these interviews given by Pope Francis. They continue to practise their faith as they always have done but the rot is happening beneath the surface. I was forced to quit attending a prayer meeting after the Marriage equality referendum because I said it was disaster for our country. They all thought it was so kind to allow same sex marriage and I was a very hard line bigot. The church is in a very bad place. I don't know where it will all end. We have to pray a lot. Lutz decided Maria's message today really spells it out.

 

Amazingly, some people think it is.

 

Mother of God Forum.

 

You hit the nail on the head maryrose, the referendum was presented in such a way so as to appeal to people's emotions.

 

My reply was referring to the Remnant website.

 

View attachment 5075

 

It was my understanding that it was a prerequisite for Catholic marriage for both parties to understand that they needed to remain open to life in the marriage act.
Maybe it was that both parties needed to be able to consummate the marriage, as in, a spouse who was paralyzed could not consummate the act. Why I am remembering this, I don't know. I am not sure about the truth of what I just posted, but I seem to remember it thus.

 

Yes, the marriage is to be consummated.

As far as being open to children, the couple must be. But temporary use of contraceptives, while gravely sinful, does not invalidate the marriage. If one spouse were to get themselves sterilized, with the aim to never be open to children, yes, that would be grounds for annulment

 

http://www.onepeterfive.com/ewtn-panel-popes-comments-on-marriage-unacceptable-reckless/
EWTN Panel: Pope’s Comments on Marriage “Unacceptable”, “Reckless”
On the June 23rd episode of The World Over With Raymond Arroyo, we witnessed one of the best (if not the best) discussions of papal impropriety in mainstream Catholic news. Again and again, Arroyo shows us that he gets it. And his guests (even with Robert Royal’s tendency to softpedal things) are right there with him.

If the video doesn’t take you there directly, go to 27:46. Even if you’re not a regular viewer of the show (or not a fan) this is definitely worth your time:



The awakening continues. Please pray for these men, and for their continued courage and honesty.

 

Brian, There is no easy answer for all of this, there is no rewind button. Keep praying.

 

I have a gut feeling the Holy Father is preparing us for the Truth. And if we have an Illumination of conscience in the near future, I began to think honestly about what people I know over the years have done in relation to family planning.

The Truth is and we all know it, something in the region of 80% of Catholics use contraception. I do not mean Natural Family Planning. And I wonder if that figure includes those who have had the snip as we used to call it, or sterilisation. In thinking about it, a lot of Catholics got sterilised once they had their family complete, at least people I know.

I can tell you, in Ireland years ago we used to hear farmers would be on the look out for a money cow, or a laying hen in the form of a teacher or a nurse. A woman who would bring an income in as well as the wifely duties the Church demanded as the right of the husband. To me that was noting short of slavery and sexual abuse. Not to mention the fruits of the ritual abuse which resulted in children.

Indeed the children were always welcomed and loved, and so they should be.

But the women fell in love, and once the ring was on the finger, the love turned into something less than what God intended.

You see, when the Church expected the wife to obey the husband; they forgot to mention the husband should love his wife like Christ loves His Church and be prepared to die for her. Not use her like a slave with benefits.

Of course this was not every single man, and not every single woman in this situation; but far too many for a Practising Roman Catholic marriage to withstand the rigours of this modern society.

I think Holy Father has given us much pause for thought, maybe we would benefit by considering our behaviour towards each other, and work to improve our marriages to be what God intended in the first place.

 

After Mother Angelica was forced to let go of her control of EWTN in 2000 in order to prevent too much control by bishops who were against her, the network disappointed her and in the last decade and a half of her life at least, she wasn't interested in it, wanting the channel changed to Fox News or reruns of I Love Lucy from the station she’d founded. I've been told that she also would not let her sisters watch!!

I doubt if she would ever have authorized any panel set up to spread doubt about or dissension against the Pope however it couched itself. When it is expressed as it was here..."this is a pattern of 'this' Pope"....like is there now a choice for allegiance to someone else...like this program's usual go to prelates who attempt to "explain what the Pope really means" while assuming some make believe position that sets them higher than Peter? There isn't a lot of love expressed for or prayer insisted upon for the faithful in order to support him....as seems to be the desire by our Blessed Mother in her most recent messages these days. At least Benedict "has his back" in prayer and "sends them packing", those who attempt to get him to express his own questioning of Peter. If they love or even prefer Benedict then they should follow his example. Explaining "him" these days has taken on more of a type of ad hominem attacks....against the person of. Is there some agenda for their "real church" vs the one decided upon by the Holy Spirit? This kind of division could be just the kind of influence upon the faithful that could encourage them to choose to follow their favorite "traditional" hierarchical cleric into some parallel church...as prophecy alludes to.

 

On traditionalcatholicpriest.com there is a beautiful presentation of the old marriage ceremony. In it I see the husband promises to to love and care for his wife in accordance with the intentions of Christ and His Church.

He promises to actually worship her until he dies. He also hands over all he owns to her from the start of their marriage....."with ALL my worldly goods I thee endow." No 50-50 split here. 100% to his beloved. This helped make Mother secure in her hopes for a large family.

Of course the wife reciprocated with her own promises. I suppose I am very fortunate to say that is how my parents marriage began. Mother tells me these were the vows they took and kept. And they were recognized as sacred vows. Of course it was not at all plain sailing but they persevered.

I am very much a Catholic of today but there is a beauty in the old ways.