After Amoris Laetitia was released some Catholic commentators bent themselves into pretzels claiming that the Pope had not authorized the reception of the Eucharist by Catholics in adulterous marriages. The Pope now definitively states that they were fools:
In a letter reportedly leaked by a priest in Argentina, Pope Francis writes that there is “no other interpretation” of Amoris Laetitia other than one admitting divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion in some cases. The letter, dated September 5, comes in response to a confidential document by the bishops of the Buenos Aires pastoral region to priests instructing them on the application of the Pope’s controversial apostolic exhortation. LifeSite has acquired copies of both original documents and has provided professional side-by-side translation.
The Spanish original of the letter from the Pope is here
The Spanish original of the bishops’ directive is here
LifeSiteNews’ translation of the Pope’s letter is here
LifeSiteNews’ translation of the bishops’ directive is here
The story was first published yesterday by the Spanish-language Catholic news service InfoCatolica and an anonymous Argentinean Catholic blogger whose blog is known as “The Wanderer.” The blogger has published photostatic copies of the original documents, and LifeSite has been informed that the blogger’s source is a priest in Buenos Aires. After consulting with sources, LifeSite believes that the blogger is trustworthy and that the copies of the letters are authentic.
The document by the bishops of the pastoral region of Buenos Aires interprets for priests in the region the 8th chapter of Amoris Laetitia on how to deal with couples who are remarried after divorces but have not been granted annulments. It follows closely the language of the most controversial parts of the papal exhortation including the infamous footnote 351, which opens the door to what Cardinal Raymond Burke and other faithful bishops have called “sacrilege.”
The bishops’ directive called “Basic Criteria for the Application of Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia” says that in “complex circumstances” when the remarried couple could not “obtain a declaration of nullity,” the priests can nevertheless move forward to grant them access to Holy Communion. If the priest recognizes 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,” says the directive, “Amoris Laetitia opens the possibility of access to the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist (cf. notes 336 and 351).”
The Pope’s letter affirms this path with effusive praise for the bishops’ work. Writing to the delegate of the Buenos Aires Pastoral Region, Monsignor Sergío Alfredo Fenoy, the Pope says, “I thank you for the work they have done on this: a true example of accompaniment for the priests.”
Pope Francis adds: “The document is very good and completely explains the meaning of chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations. And I am certain that it will do much good. May the Lord reward this effort of pastoral charity.”
Go here to read the rest. To boil all of this down, our Pope now holds that people can be in a state of mortal sin and worthily receive communion. Either the Catholic Church was wrong for 2000 years, or there is something desperately wrong with this pontificate.
There are parishes that have posted in the vestibule or church bulletins information about worthy reception of Holy Communion.
– I wonder what those good and holy priests’ will do. ? Priests are divided. There are priests who have just been quiet about pope francis, they are confused by hope that there will be some simple explanations to give.
ISIS is beheading martyrs, the devil is trying to behead the Church.
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http://arkvalleyparishes.org/Receiving%20the%20Lord%20Worthily%20in%20Holy%20Communion.pdf
Viola, Pope Francis can pastorally turn a sin into a non-sin. Sign me up for some of that.
“[O]ur Pope now holds that people can be in a state of mortal sin and worthily receive communion.”
But, of course, “diminished responsibility and culpability” to which the bishops refer, would exclude the possibility of mortal sin, which requires not only grave matter but full knowledge and full consent.
The books of moral theology are full of examples.
MP-S
….and what about the Church’s responsibility as Mother and Teacher. Mater et Magistrate
Could there be any thing more foolish and evil in the world than a parent taking the line ” what you don’t know can’t hurt you”?!
Psalm 19. There are unknown faults and they have such a deleterious effect
MP-S
So basically a priest may know a person shouldn’t do something, but won’t tell the individual?
“diminished responsibility and culpability”
Give me a break! If adult Catholics know nothing else about their faith they know they can’t receive Communion if they are in a marriage and have a prior marriage with a living former spouse which has not been annulled by the Church.
“In “Concerning the Reception of Holy Communion by Divorced-and-Remarried Members of the Faithful” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in a letter to the world’s bishops on October 14, 1994 said,
7. The mistaken conviction of a divorced-and-remarried person that he may receive holy communion normally presupposes that personal conscience is considered in the final analysis to be able, on the basis of one’s own convictions, to come to a decision about the existence or absence of a previous marriage and the value of the new union. However, such a position is inadmissible. Marriage, in fact, both because it is the image of the spousal relationship between Christ and his church as well as the fundamental core and an important factor in the life of civil society, is essentially a public reality. [/library/curia/cdfdivor.txt]
By this document the Holy See affirmed the continuous theology and discipline of the Catholic Church that those who are divorced and remarried without a Decree of Nullity for the first marriage (whether that marriage was made within or outside the Catholic Church) are in an objectively adulterous union that prevents them from honestly repenting, receiving absolution for their their sins, and receiving Holy Communion. Until the marital irregularity is resolved by a Marriage Tribunal, or other procedures which apply to marriages of the non-baptized, they may not approach Penance or Holy Communion. As Pope John Paul II pointed out in Reconciliation and Penance, the Church desires such couples to participate in the Church’s life to the extent possible (and this participation in Mass, Eucharistic adoration, devotions and so on is a great spiritual help to them), as they work toward full sacramental participation.
A Unique Case. One final situation is that of those who have repented of their illicit union, but remain together for a serious reason, such as for the sake of their children. Catholic pastoral practice allows that IF their pastor judges that scandal can be avoided (meaning most people are unaware of their remarriage and consider them a married couple), then they may live together as “brother and sister” (without any sexual relations), and be admitted to the sacraments. If scandal can not be avoided, then they must either separate or refrain from the sacraments.”
https://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/communion_of_divorced_and_remarr.htm
Francis: making sedevacantantism attractive and respectable since 2013.
I’m trademarking this,”Francis, more pastoral than Jesus.”
– Pope endorses Argentine bishops’ document on Amoris Laetitia |Vatican Radio
– Pope Francis on the letter of Argentine bishops dedicated to ”Amoris laetitia” | L’Osservatore Romano
Even in the unlikely event of a person invincible ignorantstumbling into the irregular situation of divorced + civilly remarried without a decree of nullity on either party’s prior marriage and they went to confession, from the priest, they must hear what St. John the Baptist said to King Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have another’s wife/husband”.
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Cf. One unanswered question RE: #AmorisLaetitia and its advocates: After confession, do those with “attenuating circumstances” return to their divorced + civilly remarried life?
In related news: Tim Kaine shows his Hagan lio spirit
Perhaps the Pope believes that all religions are converging to new understanding of being absorbed in the Spirit of Christ with each person choosing his own morality as his conscience dictates. This is what the Spirit of Vatican II means. If allowed to continue It also means the end of the Catholic Church as we know it. Vatican II was diabolical. Who has eyes to see, let him see.
Vatican II was diabolical. Who has eyes to see, let him see.
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It was a valid oecumenical council. The thing is, I’d like people who promote what they call the ‘hermaneutic of continuity’ and say the problem is lack of ‘authentic reception’ of the Council to explain just what the ‘fruits’ of the Council are or have been. The best offering I’ve seen in the last 15 years begins and ends with Dom Bettinelli’s precis of how financial arrangements had improved and been less prone to abuse after 1965. (Bettinelli rented a room in a rectory for several years and was exposed to much priest table talk). The problem of sexual deviance in the American clergy was present prior to the Council and grew dramatically worse in the 1950s, Other than that, the ruin’s pretty much post-1965 (even though there were shortcomings prior to that date, as there will be in any institution staffed by human beings).
? to @Art Deco’s comment.
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Either ecumenical councils under a pope are infallible as the Church teaches or they are not. I go with what the Church teaches.
FMShyanguya–there was nothing infallible about Vatican II. It was a pastoral council not doctrinal. I go with what Christ teaches: By their fruit you shall know them.
@Michael Dowd I reproduced the comment below I posted at 1P5
In Church Tradition history and in her Teaching, there is nothing termed as a pastoral council but there are Ecumenical Councils and Vatican II is the last of 21. The Council of Jerusalem or Apostolic Council held in Jerusalem around 50 AD is unique among the ancient pre-ecumenical councils in that it is considered by Catholics and Orthodox to be a prototype and forerunner of the later ecumenical councils.
At least as regards, Amoris Laetitia I thought Father Z had some good comments along those lines in this post which, at least as I understand him, distill down to, if AL and the Argentine pastoral letter are interpreted in continuity with teaching/tradition, and if the confessor is doing his job in the same spirit, and if the couple seeking communion are discerning/forming their consciences rightly. . .
Nobody in this situation is going to profane the eucharist by recieving it unworthily. because,except for a unicorn of a special snow flake or two, nobody in this situation is going to be recieving.
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Do take notice of all the ifs, as well as of the fact that I’m not talking about the kind of people (lay and clerical) who are going to do whatever the heck they feel like doing regardless of what the Church teaches.
Art Deco wrote, “there were shortcomings prior to that date, as there will be in any institution staffed by human beings.”
There was much more than individual “shortcomings.”
“With every day that passes, the conflict between tendencies that set Catholic against Catholic in every order–social, political, philosophical–is revealed as sharper and more general. One could almost say that there are now two quite incompatible “Catholic mentalities,” particularly in France. And that is manifestly abnormal, since there cannot be two Catholicisms”
And
“[U]nprecedented perhaps in depth and extent–for it is at the same time scientific, metaphysical, moral, social and political–[the crisis] is not a “dissolution” [for the spirit of faith does not die], nor even an “evolution” [for the spirit of faith does not change], it is a purification of the religious sense, and an integration of Catholic truth.”
Those two quotations from Maurice Blondel were written in 1907.
One has only to consider the way in which the works of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, Henri Brémond, Joseph Maréchal SJ, Marie-Dominique Chenu OP, Henri de Lubac SJ, Yves Congar OP, Jean Daniélou SJ and the Oratorian Louis Bouyer were received over the following 50 years to see the truth of Blondel’s assessment.
“One has only to consider the way in which the works of the greatest (most heretical)theologians of the 20th century, Henri Brémond, Joseph Maréchal SJ, Marie-Dominique Chenu OP, Henri de Lubac SJ, Yves Congar OP, Jean Daniélou SJ and the Oratorian Louis Bouyer were received over the following 50 years to see the truth of Blondel’s assessment.”
These theologians were the masterminds of Vatican II whose heretical thinking led to the devastation of the Church we see today. One of The truly great theologians of the twentieth century was Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.
Michael Dowd
Père Garrigou-Lagrange is a prime example of the Neo-Scholasticism, described by Blondel in his correspondence with Auguste Valensin:
“First, the scholastic ideology, which still exclusively dominates, includes the study neither of religious psychology nor of the subjective facts that convey to the conscience the action of the objective realities whose presence in us Revelation indicates; this ideology only considers as legitimate the examination of what objectively informs us about these realities as designated and defined. Moreover, and especially, everything is instinctively resisted that would limit the authoritarianism born of an exclusive extrinsicism. And, without formulating it, the conception is entertained according to which everything in religious life comes from on high and from without.”
Perhaps, Père Garrigou-Lagrange’ s greatest weakness is that he fails to address the basic problem of Neo-Scholasticism, adumbrated by Maréchal in France, Rahner in Germany and Lonergan in the US. Scholasticism had borrowed from Aristotle a whole battery of categories: potency and act, matter and form, essence and existence, cause and effect. These provide a powerful tool for analysing our descriptive language, but it is by no means obvious that the structure of our descriptive language reflects the structure of every describable thing or that the nature of being can somehow be deduced from the grammar of description.
The Transcendental Thomists were alive to this issue; for Père Garrigou-Lagrange, the Vienna Circle might as well not have existed.
MPJ. One good quote deserves another:
“Maurice Blondel was a Layman who was exposed as a Modernist Heretic by 19th and early 20th Century Thomists (theologians who follow the teachings of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas) for having rationalized theology. He was also exposed as a Modernist Heretic by the periodical “L’Action Francaise”.
His heresies included the error that whatever is Supernatural, e.g. Sanctifying Grace, which is found in a person, ultimately comes from human nature itself – not from God. As a natural consequent, Sanctifying Grace, which is a participation in very Life of God, therefore is not natural to mankind because it is a free gift that is above our nature. This leads him to even more heresies by claiming that not only Faith, but even the Supernatural Life of Sanctifying Grace is already “inside man”.
http://www.traditionalcatholicmass.com/home-m120.html#4)%20Mr.%20Maurice%20Blondel
Michael Dowd wrote, “”Maurice Blondel was a Layman who was exposed as a Modernist Heretic by 19th and early 20th Century Thomists (theologians who follow the teachings of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas)”
In which they differed from Cardinal Henri de Lubac’s assessment of Blondel, in his Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace: “Latin theology’s return to a more authentic tradition has taken place–not without some jolts, of course–in the course of the last century. We must admit that the main impulse for this return came from a philosopher, Maurice Blondel. His thinking was not primarily exercised in the areas proper to the professional theologians, nor did it base itself on a renewed history of tradition. Still, he is the one who launched the decisive attack on the dualist theory that was destroying Christian thought. Time after time he demonstrated the deficiencies of the thesis of the “extrinsicist” school, which recognized “no other link between nature and the supernatural than an ideal juxtaposition of elements which…were impenetrable to each other, and which were brought together by our intellectual obedience, so that the supernatural can subsist only if it remains extrinsic to the natural and if it is proposed from without as something important only in so far as it is a supernature”
St John Paul II, who had the highest esteem for de Lubac, stopped his address during a major talk and acknowleged the presence of de Lubac saying, “I bow my head to Father Henri de Lubac.” He later conferred the red hat on him.