Great news! Many prominent Catholics who have signed other appeals and protests to this pope on matters regarding family and marriage have now started an initiative that stresses the positive in Church teaching ante Bergoglio...
Firm fidelity to an immutable Magisterium
80 prominent Catholics reaffirm Church teaching on the family and morality
by Marco Tosatti
Translated from
September 27, 2016
A Declaration of Fidelity to the immutable teaching of the Church on matrimony and its uninterrupted discipline was published today by a group of 80 Catholics, including cardinals, bishops, priests, eminent scholars, leaders of family organizations and prominent representatives of civilian society.
The Declaration was published through the Italian association Supplica Filiale (Filial Appeal) which had gathered almost a million signatures online (including 91 prelates) in between the two 'family synods' asking Pope Francis for a word of clarification that would dissipate the confusion disseminated in the Church by Cardinal Kasper's keynote address to the secret consistory of February 2014 on fundamental questions of natural and Christian morality.
Noting that such confusion has only grown among the faithful after the two synodal assemblies on the family and the publication of the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation
Amoris laetitia (and its more or less official interpretations), the signatories of the Declaration say they feel the urgent moral duty to reiterate the bimillenary teaching of Catholic doctrine on matrimony, the family, and the moral discipline practised for centuries with respect to these basic institutions of Christian civilization.
Such a grave duty, the signatories say, becomes even more urgent in view of the growing attacks by secularist forces against marriage and the family - attacks which no longer seem to have the barriers once presented by Catholic practice, at least as this is now generally presented to the public.
Solidly supported by a crystalline and unequivocal teaching, and until recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Magisterium of the Church, the Declaration is articulated in 27 affirmations of truth that are explicitly or implicitly negated or made ambiguous in the language of various ecclesial documents of a pastoral nature.
These have to do, the signatories say, with unmodifiable doctrines and practices regarding faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the respect owed to the Eucharist, the impossibility of partaking of the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin, the conditions of repentance in order to receive sacramental absolution, the
universal observance of the Sixth Commandment, the most serious duty not to give public scandal and not to lead the People of God to sin, or to relativize good and bad, the objective limits of conscience, etc.
The preamble to the Declaration is as follows:
The full Declaration is available in English and Italian on the site
http://www.filialappeal.org/full
where it will shortly be available in French, German, Spanish and Portuguese on
http://www.filialappeal.org/
Those who wish to sign the declaration may do so on the same site.