Fr Z has been using this graphic to illustrate some of his AL-related posts - it is a perfect at-a-glance commentary on a document which even dares to [mis]quote the saint out of context in order to justify its most outrageous propositions.
The crisis we are living
by Fr. Gerald E. Murray
January 6, 2018
The publication in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis of Pope Francis’s letter confirming the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia by the bishops of the Buenos Aires region marked a new phase in the serious crisis affecting the Church. We now know that the pastoral advice of this group of bishops embodies what Pope Francis intended in chapter 8 of AL.
Pope Francis wrote to them: “The document is very good and completely explains the meaning of chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations.” Pope Francis’s endorsement had previously been in the form of a private letter. Such a letter does indicate the pope’s mind on a certain matter, but it is not an act of official teaching for the whole Church.
With its publication in the Acta (along with the Argentine document) under the new title of Apostolic Letter, and further described in an accompanying note as possessing the quality of “authentic magisterium,” it is no longer a private letter.
And it’s no surprise that three Kazakh bishops this week issued a public statement affirming traditional teaching and (in an extraordinary move) were quickly joined by former nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and Archbishop Luigi Negri – with perhaps others to follow.
[Only one so far – Cardinal Janis Pujats (born 1930), emeritus Archbishop of Riga, Latvia. Where are Cardinal Burke and Brandmueller of the DUBIA - here is the Correctio they might have made if they had the guts and commonsense to followup on their DUBIA instead of waiting for Ber-godot - and Cardinals Sarah and Mueller, who surely cannot be faulted by the Vatican – and the Dictator himself – for simply subscribing to immutable Catholic truth (especially Mueller who keeps insisting that AL changes nothing in Catholic teaching – well, so! Sign up with the profession, and make it be the final flip in your rhetorical acrobatics, one on which you will henceforth remain firm! ] [P.S. Marco Tosatti has just posted that Mons. Andreas Laun, former Auxiliary Bishop of Salzburg, Austria, has signed up on the 'Profession'. Laun, a Salesian born in 1942, was promptly retired by this pope as soon as he turned 75 last October.]
It’s worth noting, however, that
the Buenos Aires guidelines leave room for further interpretation by each bishop: “We believe it is convenient, as bishops of the same pastoral region, to agree to certain minimal criteria. We offer them without prejudice to the authority that each bishop has in his own diocese to specify them, complete them, or restrict them.”
So the guidelines for interpreting AL do not ask individual bishops, in the Buenos Aires region or now of the whole world, simply to follow what they propose. Rather, individual bishops can “specify, complete, or restrict” the “minimal criteria.” And thus, the papal endorsement also implies that each bishop retains authority in his own diocese. The advice given in the guidelines seems at first to reaffirm – but then contradicts – the constant teaching and discipline of the Church.
[But that’s the tangled web any deceiver weaves around himself once he starts to deceive – he is no longer able to keep track of his perpetual ‘accomodations’ to justify his decepti0n(s) and ends up contradicting himself all over the place.]
The Buenos Aires bishops write:
“When the concrete circumstances of a couple [in a second marriage] make it feasible, especially when both are Christians with a journey of faith, it is possible to propose that they make the effort of living in continence.”
The encouragement to live as brother and sister, when their particular circumstances (for example, ill health, young children, advanced age) would make separating inadvisable, in order to receive worthily the help of the sacraments, was clearly taught by Saint John Paul II in various places.
The next paragraph from the Argentine bishops, however, teaches the exact opposite:
In other, more complex circumstances, and when it is not possible to obtain a declaration of nullity, the aforementioned option may not, in fact, be feasible. 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.
Here’s the problem:
When a group of bishops [openly stating what their leader the pope is too cowardly to say so straight out himself but chooses to remain ambiguous because "I'm not giving anyone a chance to cite my own words as proof of material heresy"] teaches that persons in invalid second marriages are free to judge that it is not “feasible” for them to avoid committing acts of adultery, they are telling the faithful that they are not at fault for doing what the Catholic Church teaches to be gravely sinful. [Which is exactly what Bergoglio has been doing in many indirect ways.]
“Feasibility” means “the state or degree of being easily or conveniently done,” and even more precisely “capable of being done, accomplished or carried out.”
The avoidance of mortal sin does involve difficulty and inconvenience. But the Church does not teach that grown-up people in their right minds are incapable of obeying God’s commandments.
To say to someone that it may be infeasible for him to refrain from acts of adultery is to advise him that, in effect, he is not subject to God’s law in this matter. When pastors tell Catholics living in sin that they are not really guilty of mortal sin as long as they decide that they cannot “feasibly” observe God’s law, the shepherds have seriously failed them.
This unchristian fatalism of denying man’s freedom and ability to avoid committing mortal sin leads to the incredible claim that adultery is not that bad for some people, that they are free to receive both sacramental absolution and Holy Communion without renouncing the intention to commit acts of adultery, and that this reception of the sacraments will “dispose the person to continue maturing and growing with the aid of grace.” This plainly contradicts the Gospel as taught by the Church through the ages. [But that, in effect, is what Bergoglio does and has been doing with his unilateral relaxation of sacramental discipline. It is not out of sheer prejudice that I keep saying he is anti-Catholic and worse, anti-Christ, in that he seems to truly believe he can improve on Christ’s Gospel. It is a lethal Luciferian hubris that few do not see or do not denounce enough. How can the elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church be a stand-in for Satan himself, who never had such an instrument at his disposal in all of human history?]
Cardinal Walter Kasper recently said:
“Universally valid objective commandments . . . cannot be applied mechanically or by purely logical deduction to concrete, often complex and perplexing, situations.” He denies that this is moral relativism: “[This] has nothing to do with situational ethics that knows no universal commandments, it is not about exceptions to the commandment, but about the question of [sic] understood as situational conscience cardinal virtue of prudence.”
To justify this novel position,Cardinal Kasper caricatures the Church’s unwavering fidelity to God’s word as a “mechanical” (read “inhuman”) attempt to apply “purely logical deductions.”
It is offensive to describe fidelity to the Church’s perennial doctrine and discipline in the matter of divorced and remarried Catholics as acting as an unthinking and uncaring machine. Speaking Christ’s truth is the perpetual mission of the Church’s pastors.
As the Kazak bishops rightly say: “The Catholic faith by its nature excludes a formal contradiction between the faith professed on the one hand and the life and practice of the sacraments on the other.”
Yet that is where one arrives if one claims that for some people mortal sin is both inevitable and inculpable. The Gospel is compromised, the constant Magisterium of the Church is repudiated and those who object to this are stigmatized.
Herein lies the crisis we are living.
Part of the crisis is that so few men of the Church are willingly to commit themselves openly to say what they do stand for. At least that parish priest in Turin had the courage to openly say, "I don't believe in the Credo" - not that I have read of any action against him so far. This is a priest whose every act is sacrilegious since he does not believe in the essentials of the faith - yet there he was, saying Christmas Mass to celebrate an event he does not believe in. And the paradox is that, as an ordained priest, every time he says the Mass it is 'in persona Christi' and so the sacrament is considered valid! Should he perhaps be investigated now and determine whether he will be denied his priestly faculties for open apostasy?... But the silence of the shepherds is no more deafening than in the non-reaction to AL - and other anti-Catholic outrages perpetrated by this pope.
The five bishops are surely not alone
in being concerned about Communion
A silent majority of bishops agree, but one can appreciate why they haven't spoken out
[And the discipline of sacraments, in general,
but why aren't more signing up with their 'Profession'?]
by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith
4 Jan 2018
The news that five bishops have made a declaration upholding the Church’s teaching about marriage and its teaching about divorce is cheering news. At the same time it is depressing that only five (so far) have signed up to it. The whole thing is worth reading, but the key word to note is found in the title, namely “immutable”.
The Bishops are not saying anything new, but merely restating what has been always and everywhere believed. [In St. Vincent de Lerins's elegant Latin formulation, “Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”.] Moreover, no one should object to this, given that we are constantly being told that “the doctrine has not changed”.
What I particularly like in the statement is the following, which cannot be stressed enough:
“The admission of so-called “divorced and remarried” faithful to Holy Communion, which is the highest expression of the unity of Christ the Spouse with His Church, means in practice a way of approving or legitimizing divorce, and in this meaning a kind of introduction of divorce in the life of the Church.”
The document then goes on to note that Our Blessed Lord prohibited divorce in no uncertain terms.
The divorce by the back door argument has been made before, by many, including myself. I have yet to see any proper response to this argument.
[It's one of those things that are so obvious everyone misses it! All this hooplah about remarried divorcees is an open admission by the powers-that-be in this misguided 'Church' that divorce is here to stay and it has become so routine that it has endangered the discipline of sacraments, which AL has since rendered 'untenable', anyway. But start your arguments against AL with that unspoken but obvious assumption - Bergoglio and his minions have simply accepted divorce as so common it might as well be inevitable.]
Of course, some may dismiss this latest statement as just the work of a small unrepresentative minority. I doubt that it the case, while at the same time not expecting many others will sign this document, and noting that two of the bishops who have are already retired.
But there will be many who do not sign but who will heartily endorse what is said, and I can think of several. One only needs to remember how few have endorsed the guidelines of the Maltese Bishops, for example, and how the vast majority of Bishops in the world have said nothing at all on the subject.
“But have you noticed that the majority of bishops throughout the world are remarkably silent?” as Fr Thomas Weinandy asked. These bishops constitute the silent majority: it would be great if they all spoke, but one can perhaps appreciate their reasons for keeping shtum.
After a time, though, one notices a pattern. This declaration of the five bishops comes after numerous other declarations, letters, corrections and other documents. The first of these, the letter of the five hundred or so priests, I signed, and have no regrets about signing. All the other declarations essentially repeat what was said then, to wit:
“We wish, as Catholic priests, to re-state our unwavering fidelity to the traditional doctrines regarding marriage and the true meaning of human sexuality, founded on the Word of God and taught by the Church’s Magisterium for two millennia.”
Almost four years have passed since then, and has the conversation moved on? It would be nice if we could have a proper dialogue on this matter, and a good place to start would be with an answer to those dubia of the four Cardinals. After all, we are not afraid of dialogue, are we? [Please, Fr. Lucie-Smith! I wish I could detect greater irony in this paragraph. Otherwise, i just sounds so naive. Just as there is none so blind as he who refuses to see, so there is none so dumb and deaf as he, Bergoglio, who has no use for the 'dialog' he otherwise advocates incessantly, when he is too cowardly to come out and say what he means unequivocally!
At this point, no one really expects Bergoglio to 'dialog' about AL - it's a fait accompli, his fait accompli, and he's never going to renounce his bastard child, as hideous and infamous as it may be. The important thing for Bergoglio is not to give anyone a handle so they can use his words to technically accuse him of material heresy under canon law. Failing that, he is the pope nontheless - and everything that means in power and authority - and therefore IMPREGNABLE!]
Meanwhile, some Italian entrepreneurs probably think it is still worthwhile to invest in a Bergoglio product line. Here's the latest novelty out
for Epiphany (photo from Antonio Socci's Facebook).
THE LOLLI-POPE, A 'THREE KINGS' SPECIAL
I call it the LOLLIPOPE. The Italian 'lecca-lecca' literally means 'lick, lick', so maybe in Italian, it could be LECCA-PAPA! Which sounds gross but
appropriate: See, whoever thought this up probably failed to consider that the only one who would normally lick a face is a dog, but probably
they also intended it for all those dogs out there eagerly licking up to this pope. And who in his right mind would pay 4 euro for a 'lollipope' even
if it includes a prayer?.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/01/2018 21:15]