Italian cardinal issues guidelines
upholding Catholic tradition on Communion
by Jan Bentz
ROME, Italy, October 17, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The implementation of
Amoris Laetitia has varied drastically according to interpretation of bishops, as evidenced by the reaction to the document throughout the world.
The discrepancy in implementation could point back to the broad spectrum in which AL can be understood and has led Catholics to previously ask for clarification.
A German bishop recently announced that he sees the core message of AL in the fact that “the Holy Father allows an opening towards the receiving of the sacraments, after an in-depth examine of conscience and spiritual direction.”
Guidelines from Cardinal Vicar Agostino Vallini of the Diocese of Rome, which only recently were published,
permit sexually active, cohabitating couples to receive Communion in “limited” cases, as LifeSiteNews has reported.
Conversely, Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, the former Archbishop of Florence, has published his own vademecum for confessors that forbids them to make exceptions, as Vatican analyst Sandro Magister reports.
Pope Francis has himself stated recently that the model diocesan implementation of AL was done by the Argentine bishops of Buenos Aires. In a letter to the bishops there written last month, the Holy Father said there can be "no other interpretation" of AL than to admit divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion in some cases.
But Antonelli, who is also the former head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, took initiative and told priests in his former diocese – in full agreement with Cardinal Guiseppe Betori, the current archbishop – that the guidelines to interpret AL must be in a hermeneutic of continuity with the Church’s Magisterium. That means in plain English that Communion for “remarried” divorced is possible but only if they live like brother and sister.
It is noteworthy that Cardinal Antonelli gave his text to the priests of the Trieste diocese in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region in northeast Italy on October 13.
Moreover, his vademecum has been made available in five languages by the Pontifical Council for the Family for implementation in other dioceses around the world. For English speakers, the text can be found here:
http://www.familiam.org/pcpf/allegati/13757/Amoris_Laetitia_ING.pdf
Points 4 and 5 deal with the subjective personal responsibility of the Catholic individual in the case of “remarriage” and divorce.
With regard to chastity in any given difficult case, the vademecum states:
“I said that the observance of the moral law could be deemed mistakenly impossible for a person, because in reality, with the help of God’s grace, it is always possible to observe the commandments, even to be chaste according to their standard of living. […] God does not command the impossible, but in commanding, urges you to do what you can, and in asking what you cannot do, He helps you so that you can do it (Council of Trent, DH 1536).” And further on:
“Keeping God’s law in particular situations can be difficult, extremely difficult, but it is never impossible. This is the constant teaching of the Church’s tradition. (St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 102).”
Point 5 explicates: “Since negative general rules always oblige, without exception, the Christian in an irregular situation is bound before God to do everything possible to get out of the objective disorder and harmonize his behavior with the norm. It may be that his conscience, mistaken in good faith, was not aware of it. However, the priest accompanying him must guide him, with love and prudence, through his discernment and in accomplishment God’s will for him, until he assumes a form of life consistent with the Gospel.”
With these phrases, the handout explains what a “pastoral path of discernment” must really aim to achieve.
The steps that must be taken along the path are enumerated:
1) Verification of the validity of the previous marriage and possible annulment;
2) celebration of a religious marriage or radical sanction of a civil marriage;
3) ending the cohabitation, if there are no impediments;
4) practicing sexual continence, if other solutions are not possible;
5) in the case of an temporarily invisible error and, hence, refusal of sexual consistence, assessment of the possible rectitude of conscience in the light of the personality and the global experience (prayer, love of neighbor, participation in the life of the Church, and respect of her doctrine, humility, and obedience before God);
6) finally, sacramental absolution and Holy Communion may be given.
Made available universally through the Pontifical Council, this handout will likely be used by others in dioceses and parishes worldwide to help clarify the Church’s teaching.
Apropos, I will post one of the articles I had tagged last week. Given that the synods nonetheless 'produced' in AL what Bergoglio would have wanted them to support unequivocally (so he could have been unequivocal about it), Fr. De Souza may be over-estimating the effect of the letter. For me, the fact that it was written at all was and is the big news, though it leaves me more perplexed that the writers of the letter and the apparent majority of the synodal fathers who agreed with their 'conservatism' then compromised inexplicably by not insisting on including the three sentences in Familiaris consortio84 that might have stopped Bergoglio, if he were not Bergoglio, in his malicious track! But given how determined he is about his goals - whatever Jorge wants, Jorge gets - he might still have written (or caused to be written) Chapter 8 of AL with all its semantic tricks and traps, and simply ignored the reiteration of his sainted predecessor's words!
How 13 cardinals changed the course of history
The letter that proved to be the turning point showed
the Holy Spirit was at work in a most unexpected way
by Fr Raymond de Souza
Oct 13, 2016
This time last year the second installment of the synod on the family was unfolding in Rome, the conclusion of which was as yet unknown. Now that we are in the implementation phase of
Amoris Laetitia, we can look back on the entire process with greater clarity.
It is now clear that Pope Francis does not believe that the pastoral discipline regarding the inadmissibility of the divorced and civilly remarried to the sacraments is correct and wishes to overturn it. Yet while he has gone to great lengths to make his mind clear on the subject, he has gone to equally great lengths not to formally teach it.
There are two reasons for that.
The first is that the tradition is clear, rooted in teaching of Jesus in the Gospel, and it is not possible for even the Pope to change it. Hence Pope Francis has had recourse to ambiguities, hints, private phone calls and leaked letters to let the Church know that he thinks what he cannot teach.
The second reason is that Pope Francis encountered surprising resistance to the AL agenda, first outlined by Cardinal Walter Kasper in February 2014.
The key moment in that resistance took place a year ago, on the opening day of the second family synod in 2015. It was then that Cardinal George Pell handed Pope Francis a private letter signed by 13 cardinal participants in the synod.
The letter objected to the Kasper proposal in substance, and to the attempts to engineer the synod to approve it. The next day, with the existence of the letter still unknown, the Holy Father addressed the synod to reaffirm the procedures in place and to warn participants against conspiracy theories.
The news of the letter, of which there were only two copies – one for the Holy Father and one for Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary general of the synod of bishops – was then leaked to favoured papal reporter Andrea Tornielli.
One supposes that a papal insider – or implausibly, the Holy Father himself – thought leaking the news of the discreet resistance would work to the advantage of the synod managers, putting the traditional party on the back foot, apparently at odds with the Pope. That was a key miscalculation, and the crucial moment in frustrating the Kasper proposal.
The letter of the 13 cardinals, once revealed, illustrated that some of the most senior cardinals in the Church were prepared, for the sake of fidelity to the Gospel, to resist a popular pope. The dynamic of the synod changed then, with the resistance emboldened, not cowed, and in the event the synod fathers refused to endorse the Kasper proposal.
The signatories had all seen what had happened the previous year, when Pope Francis dismissed the leading opponent of the Kasper proposal, Cardinal Raymond Burke, from his post as the Church’s “chief justice” to a largely ceremonial role. Yet they signed. And their collective credibility determined the course of the synod.
The 13, in alphabetical order, included Carlo Caffarra, then archbishop of Bologna, formerly the first president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family; Thomas Collins, archbishop of Toronto; Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, vice-president of the US Bishops Conference; Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York; Willem Eijk, archbishop of Utrecht; Gerhard Müller, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith; Wilfrid Fox Napier, archbishop of Durban; John Njue, archbishop of Nairobi; George Pell, prefect of the secretariat for the economy; Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City; Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments; Elio Sgreccia, president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy for Life; and Jorge Urosa Savino, archbishop of Caracas.
The cabinet’s front bench had written to the King. And the sovereign had to take note. When Pope Francis continued his push for the Kasper proposal in AL, he had to do so within the limited room the synod had given to him. So the apostolic exhortation hid its intent in footnotes and ambiguities.
Even now, the guidelines produced by those bishops most keen on the Kasper vision advise that any such admission to Holy Communion be done in secret. Administering the sacraments in secret is a clear sign that something is awry; any pastoral practice so conceived will not endure.
The letter of the 13 cardinals proved to be the turning point. The Holy Spirit was at work indeed, in a most unexpected way. The announcement this week of a consistory of cardinals occasioned commentary upon the role of the cardinals as the special advisers of the pope. In October 2015 the cardinals – 13 of them – gave perhaps the most important advice of recent times.
[Still, one that has been heeded in the breach rather than the observance.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/10/2016 00:22]