So, you are no more a theologian than anyone else here but your knowledge of theology is superior than the four Cardinals and those who support their request for clarity because your knowledge is impartial and theirs isn't? Here's another theologian who is concerned about the problems AL is opening up for the Church, but no doubt you will disregard his concerns because his theology isn't as impartial as yours: http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/5316/the_pastoral_and_moral_crises_that_lie_ahead.aspx The problem with Amoris Laetitia is not that it explicitly contradicts Church teaching because when read in line with that teaching, as Cardinal Muller and Cardinal Burke said soon after it was issued and before the Pope's friends started issuing their interpretations, it doesn't. The main problem is that it isn't explicit on the question of Communion for the divorced and remarried if they are unwilling to refrain from sexual intimacy proper to a valid marriage. Despite that, I would appreciate it if you would quote the text from Pope Benedict's book where he said that there is no departure or rupture from previous papal teaching, especially if it references Amoris Laetitia. I know that he said there were no contradictions between his papacy and that of Pope Francis. Did he mention the apparent contradiction between the teaching of Pope John Paul (was it in Veritas Splendor?) and the interpretations of Amoris Laeititia which are evidently contradictory? The problem arises when Amoris Laetitia is interpreted as replacing Church teaching. Cardinal Schonborn has already said that all prior Church teaching must be read in light of Amoris Laetitia. Some Bishops and priests are interpreting it as something of a stand-alone document. You said in an earlier post "If bishops and priests are using him to further false teachings, that is another matter, and I dont for one minute think that doesnt happen, but please get the facts right". Well, bishops and priests are using AL to further false teachings. Was Cardinal Cupich misrepresenting the Pope when he said at his press conference on AL that Pope Francis recognises the good in same sex unions without a single mention that they are sinful and contrary to Church teaching? Bishops and priests are certainly applying different interpretations of AL. No doubt all of them, like you, consider their knowledge of theology to be impartial and that's why it's the Pope's duty to answer the dubia. Either the Church teaches eternal Truths or it doesn't. Here's what Pope Benedict said in answer to a questtion about Communion for the divorced and remarried in June 2012 only four years prior to the publication of Amoris Laetitia: https://w2.vatican.va/content/bened...ben-xvi_spe_20120602_festa-testimonianze.html Dear friends, thank you for your very important work as family psychotherapists. Thank you for all that you do to help these suffering people. Indeed the problem of divorced and remarried persons is one of the great sufferings of today’s Church. And we do not have simple solutions. Their suffering is great and yet we can only help parishes and individuals to assist these people to bear the pain of divorce. I would say, obviously, that prevention is very important, so that those who fall in love are helped from the very beginning to make a deep and mature commitment. Then accompaniment during married life is needed, so that families are never left on their own but are truly accompanied on their journey. As regards these people - as you have said - the Church loves them, but it is important they should see and feel this love. I see here a great task for a parish, a Catholic community, to do whatever is possible to help them to feel loved and accepted, to feel that they are not “excluded” even though they cannot receive absolution or the Eucharist; they should see that, in this state too, they are fully a part of the Church. Perhaps, even if it is not possible to receive absolution in Confession, they can nevertheless have ongoing contact with a priest, with a spiritual guide. This is very important, so that they see that they are accompanied and guided. Then it is also very important that they truly realize they are participating in the Eucharist if they enter into a real communion with the Body of Christ. Even without “corporal” reception of the sacrament, they can be spiritually united to Christ in his Body. Bringing them to understand this is important: so that they find a way to live the life of faith based upon the Word of God and the communion of the Church, and that they come to see their suffering as a gift to the Church, because it helps others by defending the stability of love and marriage. They need to realize that this suffering is not just a physical or psychological pain, but something that is experienced within the Church community for the sake of the great values of our faith. I am convinced that their suffering, if truly accepted from within, is a gift to the Church. They need to know this, to realize that this is their way of serving the Church, that they are in the heart of the Church. Thank you for your commitment. Within the space of four years, how has the Holy Spirit led us to a stage where not only adulterous unions, but same sex unions and choosing assisted suicide are no longer a bar to receiving the Blessed Eucharist? Two thousand years of Church teaching "devloped" to the stage of being turned on its head in the space of four years? While I haven't read his book, I have read this reported excerpt where Pope Benedict explained the difficulties he had with Humane Vitae and that it was Pope John Paul 11 who helped him see it in a clearer light: "In the situation I was then in, and in the context of theological thinking in which I stood, Humanae Vitae was a difficult text for me," Benedict says in the book, to be published in the U.S. Nov. 3 by Bloomsbury under the title Last Testament: In His Own Words. "It was certainly clear that what it said was essentially valid, but the reasoning, for us at that time, and for me too, was not satisfactory," Benedict states. "I was looking for a comprehensive anthropological viewpoint," he continues. "In fact, it was [Pope] John Paul II who was to complement the natural-law viewpoint of the encyclical with a personalistic vision."
In the above post, the teaching of Pope John Paul on Communion for the divorced and remarried should have referenced Familiaris Consortio and not Veritas Splendor.
Smudger I believe it is imperative for the Holy Father to answer the dubia! not because we all know the real interpretations of the meaning of the AL But because it is obvious that many Bishops are twisting the truths contained in Our Holy Fathers AL! These Bishops are in real error and are leading many souls to error! Our Holy Father needs to stem the tide of this apostasy, and tell these blantant schismatic Bishops that they have got Amoris Laetitia wrong! These Bishops are making a mockery out of Our Holy Fathers Amoris Laetitia! Just read the following! Austrian bishop: ‘Remarried’ Catholics now have ‘blessing of the Pope’ to receive Communion https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/a...as-changed-the-teaching-of-the-church-for-div
No, josephite. The bishops know the truth, those who love Pope Francis and those who don't. The Pope has given to the Church a beautiful document on the family. Anyone with eves to see and ears to hear will recognize the truth.
The answer to your question, Light, is NO. If Pope Francis made a response, the same would happen as on this forum. The bishops would come back with more questions! The bishops are not asking for information. They are making a statement, a critical statement of opposition to the encyclical.
What a mix up! As you say, the Pharisees were not seeking the truth and, as I mention above, the bishops are actually not seeking information. When you write what you say about Francis seeking confusion rather than truth, you are making a terrible judgement. I think I agree with smudger that you have been influenced by many contemporary messages which are not authentic. Many of your fellow Francis critics don't believe in any contemporary messages and you correctly tell them of their error but you have swung to the opposite extreme and accepted most of them. The false ones are leading you astray I believe.
David if you wrote a beautiful letter about say........your mothers love of flowers and the garden she kept! And then you sent this letter to all your family members so they too could experience this wonderful joy she had with gardening and nature. Half of the family said how beautiful this is! its a real inspiration to me and I now want to have a lovely flower garden too! But the other half of the family said.......... well I interperate what you wrote to mean that your mother didn't like flowers at all! and really she tried to destroy all the flowers that she ever came in contact with and so I will also destroy all flowers I see! They believe that David because in your innocence...... you added a little footnote; that stated that all flowers are really just dirt and manure! Wouldn't you want the whole family to know the truth? wouldn't you correct this misinterprtation? because in truth your mother loved flowers and propogated them in her garden and your footnote had been misinterprted by some family members?
A nicely presented question, josephite You are basically asking, I think, why didn't Pope Francis make the matter referenced in the footnote, clearer. The answer, I believe, is that it deals with an area that can not easily be defined in a black and white way. It requires discerment of actual cases which will vary and which, to a degree, might not be predicatable. Because the new opportunities for reception of Holy Communion by the re-married can not be precisely laid down in a legalistic way, the Holy Father chose the method he has used (by way of the footnote). Of course, something like this opens up the possibility of misuse by some, both clergy and lay. But all Church teachings are open to abuse by those with little faith or belief. Pope Francis wants to bring back to the practice of the faith to those who otherwise might leave it completely. For those wanting more clarity, the Argentinian bishops issued a letter of guidance on the matter which Pope Francis has strongly supported, stating "The document is very good and thoroughly specifies the meaning of chapter VIII of Amoris laetitia. There are no further interpretations. " It can be read at: https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2016/09/18/guidelines-buenos-aires-bishops-divorcedremarried/
Maybe your letter was not as nicely presented as I thought... So I think maybe that you view the bulk of the encyclical as beautiful but that the new opportunities for the reception of Holy Communion by the re-married (which you recognize as present in the footnote) are a 'blot' on the otherwise good document. Am I understanding correctly now? If so, I can only say that I believe the Holy Father has a proper understanding of God's merciful love and would encourage you to read more of the homilies of Pope Francis.
Yes it is a 'blot' on the otherwise good document and in addition to this unfortunate turn of events, it has allowed dissenting Bishops to proclaim the following......... Austrian bishop: ‘Remarried’ Catholics now have ‘blessing of the Pope’ to receive Communion Austrian Bishop Benno Elbs January 4, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — An Austrian bishop has given a sweeping interview claiming that "remarried" Catholics now have the "blessing of the Pope" to receive Communion, the use of contraception is "a decision of conscience" for couples, and homosexuals can constitute a "family." Bishop Benno Elbs, who heads the Feldkirch diocese in west Austria, made the comments in an interview with Die Presse on December 23. Regarding the admission of “remarried” divorced Catholics to Communion, he said, “The teaching [of the Church] has changed insofar as she has opened the door. People have made decisions of conscience in the past, but now they can do it – so to say – with the blessing of the Pope. That is an essential progress.” Asked about the strongest tensions during the Synod for the Family in 2015 that presaged the release of the Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Elbs responded that it involved remarried and divorced Catholics. “Another point of strong tension was how to deal with people of homosexual orientation,” he said. During the Synod, the Church leaders in the German language circle had a huge influence on the discussion, Elbs said. While the group included Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it also included Cardinal Walter Kasper and was led by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the latter two being strong proponents of the “Kasper proposal” to admit divorced and remarried to Communion. “We had unanimity in everything, and the Pope has taken up a lot,” Elbs said. “Thus the German language group has had a great influence.” For Elbs, the entirety of Amoris Laetitia is about the decision of conscience: “If that is written in a footnote or not is not important. The whole paper breathes the spirit that the individual person can find a way in his conscience to deal with situations of life.” He added that the admission to Communion of those in question is irreversible. “That has been in the pastoral praxis for quite some time. Even theologically. Now we should not make the mistake of inventing new rules. The progress is an attitude that surpasses norms.” As to why the Synod did not allow artificial contraception, the bishop answered: “The Synod paper recommends natural methods of regulating conception. Recommends. The regulation of conception is a decision of conscience of the couple.” With regard to homosexuals, Elbs was asked how he defined family. “Family is a place where people are raised, grow up, become strong, where they learn, what they need for life.” The reporter then asked: “Is this also true for homosexuals?” And the bishop responded: “Yes.” Elbs authored the book in German, Where the Soul Learns to Breathe: A New Vision of Marriage and Family with Pope Francis, published in 2016. The interview brings to light what many fear: that due to the obscurity and ambiguity in which Amoris Laetitia speaks of “borderline cases,” what will be set in place as normative for a moral choice is the conscience of the individual alone. Elbs leaves aside the Church's teaching, elaborated in Pope St. John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor, that the conscience can be malformed or ignorant and that the Church’s teaching is precisely the “compass” that guides the conscience in decision making. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in No. 1777: “Moral conscience present at the heart of the person, enjoins him at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil. It also judges particular choices, approving those that are good and denouncing those that are evil. It bears witness to the authority of truth in reference to the supreme Good to which the human person is drawn, and it welcomes the commandments. When he listens to his conscience, the prudent man can hear God speaking.”
Josephite, you are never going to understand Pope Francis or the guidance he is giving the Church if you follow lifesitenews. Its agenda is to twist everything and anything to try to show the Holy Father in a bad light.
Are you saying that the news is false? http://www.churchmilitant.com/news/...ried-receiving-holy-communion-is-irreversible
AUSTRIAN BISHOP: CAN’T STOP PRACTICE OF HOLY COMMUNION TO DIVORCED & REMARRIED by Bradley Eli, M.Div., Ma.Th. • ChurchMilitant.com • January 5, 2017 FELDKIRCH, Austria (ChurchMilitant.com) - A bishop in Austria is saying that reception of Holy Communion by divorced Catholics who are "remarried" outside the Church is now an irreversible practice, and that the use of contraception is a matter of conscience. Bishop Benno Elbs of Feldkirch, Austria, told the Austrian newspaper Die Presse that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics have been receiving the Eucharist prior to the papal exhortation Amoris Laetitia (AL), and the custom is not going away. "This is irreversible. It has been a pastoral practice for a long time." In a wideranging interview published December 23 in the German press, Bp. Elbs claims that it's nothing new for civilly remarried Catholics who remain sexually active to receive the Eucharist. What is new, he claims, is that Pope Francis is seemingly on board with it. "The doctrine is changed inasmuch as the door is now open," he claimed. "People have done this before, but now with the Pope's blessing, they can, so to speak, make this decision with their conscience." Cardinal Paul Cordes of Germany noted last month that the Pope wouldn't use a mere footnote in AL to change the Church's teaching. Referring to AL's problematic footnote 351, Cdl. Cordes remarked, "And now, suddenly, there has been supposedly found, after all, a magisterial solution! ... in a footnote of the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia." Rejecting the footnoate as having any magisterial weight, Cdl. Cordes adds, "[T]he theological foundation of such a permission is not at all compelling. Its formal obligatoriness (a footnote) certainly does not have the status and rank of a Dogma." Bishops Elbs sees it another way. Asked in the interview if he thought footnote 351 of AL was adequate for opening the reception of the sacraments to sexually active divorcees, he responded, "If it's in a footnote or not isn't significant to me. The entire document breathes the spirit that the individual finds in his own conscience a way to deal with life's situations." The paper then brought up the fact that Vienna's auxiliary bishop Helmut Krätzl rejected this possibility of changing Church doctrine to meet individual cases. Bishop Elbs brushed this off. "I reluctantly disagree with Bishop Krätzl," he replied. He went on to emphasize that people who've been doing this for a long time now allegedly have the Pope's blessing to follow their conscience and that "this is a major development." There was no mention by Bp. Elbs of such terms as affected ignorance or vincible ignorance, whereby a person is morally responsible for not forming their own conscience owing to willful ignorance. The bishop also failed to mention that each Catholic is responsible for first informing his own conscience according to Catholic teaching and is further culpable for deforming his conscience by sinning repeatedly. The illicit practice of giving Holy Communion to civilly remarried Catholics has plagued the Church in Germany for many years. Back in 2013, the former archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, circulated a 14-page handout to priests outlining how priests could allow such people to receive the sacraments without the Church's requirement of abstaining from all conjugal acts. As early as 1993, Cdl. Walter Kasper and two other cardinals petitioned the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) for permission to grant the sacraments to civilly remarried Catholics without the the requisite chastity. The CDF in 1994, with Cdl. Jospeh Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) as prefect, issued the following authoritative response: Members of the faithful who live together as husband and wife with persons other than their legitimate spouses may not receive Holy Communion. Should they judge it possible to do so, pastors and confessors, given the gravity of the matter and the spiritual good of these persons as well as the common good of the Church, have the serious duty to admonish them that such a judgment of conscience openly contradicts the Church's teaching. But Bp. Elbs also believes that the practice of dissenting in conscience from Church teaching has been well established by Catholics who use artificial contraception. The interviewer asked why the bishops at the last Synod on the Family didn't authorize this illicit practice and wondered if the prevailing use of birth control by so many Catholics made the Church's teaching on this practice obsolete. Bishop Elbs thought the Synod actually did authorize contraception by letting the person decide. "The Synod recommended natural contraception," he claimed. "Recommended. Birth control is thus left up to the person's conscience." During a talk in November in London, Cdl. George Pell — a member of the Pope's "Gang of Nine — emphasized that a hardened conscience results from repeated sin and willful ignorance. The Australian prelate said this condition of having a blinded conscience can lead to a faulty discernment of morality and is therefore "not the last word in a number of ways." He went on to say that "when a priest and penitent are trying to discern the best way forward in what is known as the internal forum," they must do so under objective moral law. He recommended Catholics read St. John Paul II's "two great encyclicals": Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae, which teach that intrinsic moral evils must be rejected regardless of a person's conscience.
