A translation of the headlines:
Corriere della Sera - Abortion, the Pope's pardon
A turnaround by the Church: Priests can always absolve women and doctors
Il Gazzettino - The pope's turnaround: Abortion is absolved
La Repubblica - The pope and abortion: Yes to pardoning women and doctors
Il Tempo - Go ahead and abort: the pope forgives you
Priests can absolve women and doctors if they repent:
The last apostolic letter revolutionizes the Church
(for the 30th time in 3 years) [I'd like to see Tempo's list]
Il Resto del Carlino - 'Pardon abortion!'
The Pope: Priests can always absolve repentant women and doctors
Il Messaggero - Abortion: The pope breaks the taboo
Il Manifesto [Communist Party organ] - The good shepherd:
On abortion, Papa Bergoglio removes a huge obstacle
Il Mattino - Turnaround in the Jubilee closing letter:
Pope Francis's pardon- 'Women and doctors will always be absolved'
The Italian headlines reporting the pope's statements about forgiving abortion in his letter marking the end of his Year of Mercy are even worse than my direst anticipations of how those statements would be interpreted widely, especially among 'Catholics' already conditioned to think that abortion-on-demand is as established as routine divorce as a 'Catholic fact of life'...
From wisdom to ideology:
What the Church is coming to
Translated from
November 26, 2016
Last Sunday, November 20, concomitant with the closure of the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis signed the apostolic letter
Misericordia et misera.
What stirred up the greatest uproar about the document was the pope's conceding to all priests "the faculty of absolving those who have incurred the sin of abortion"
(No. 12), a faculty he already granted at the start of the Holy Year but limited only to its duration.
No one is disputing the legitimacy of the pope's disposition, which is among the faculties reserved to the supreme authority of the Church, and which might bring some uniformity and simplification in the normative 'jungle' there was (different dioceses had different norms; there were priests authorized to absolve the sin of abortion, and priests who were not; religious who had the privilege of withholding censure; etc) which only created confusion for the faithful. But allow me to make a couple of observations.
1. In similar situations, we would expect more clarity and precision. I do not think that the provision "I grant, from now and going forward, to all priests, by virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve whoever has incurred the sin of abortion" is a gem of juridical rigor.
[But this pope objects to 'rigor' in anything, other than in his own ideology-driven statements and actions, so don't expect any rigor in his instructions on the practice of the faith, in which he advocates flexibility above everything. No wonder that instead of being the rock he is supposed to be for the Church, he has been more like a reed easily but proudly bending wherever the prevailing wind blows.]
It is true that this is a pastoral document, not a tract on canon law. But I don't think that 'pastoral' is synonymous to superficial and approximative. First of all, what does he mean by the words "by virtue of their ministry"? Is this faculty granted by the pope different from the faculty that every priest should receive from his bishop in order to absolve sins validly
(can. 966, § 1) or is it subordinate to the latter?
In the second place, he does not refer at all to excommunication
latae sententiae provided for by Canon 1398 for the crime of abortion. Some will say - "But that is understood! The papal concession refers precisely to absolution from excommunication". Then why not have said so? Why refer only to the sin of abortion?
[In canon law, abortion is both a sin and a crime, and the penalty for the crime of abortion (for the aborting mother as for those who assist in the abortion) is automatic excommunication, which only the local bishop can lift.]
Perhaps so the new decree could be better understood by laymen? But for me, this imprecision only creates confusion. To such an extent that at the presentation of the apostolic letter, it took a newsman's question to elicit the answer from the Vatican representative that
...there will be a reform of the Code of Canon Law to deal with the norms decreed by the pope today, but excommunication is not abolished - what changes is the way by which the sinner can be free of it. Up to now, it was necessary to address a confessor duly authorized by his bishop for this task - generally, the penitentiary of the Cathedral - now absolution can be obtained from any priest, and with absolution, excommunication is also lifted.
At least, the response was clear, even if one might ask,
what is the sense of any excommunication which can be lifted arbitrarily by any priest?
2. But, leaving aside those formal considerations, what leaves us rather perplexed is the timeliness of this new discipline
[or, better said, relaxation of discipline]. It must be noted that the pope was absolutely clear in reaffirming the gravity of the sin of abortion: "I wish to reaffirm with all my powers that abortion is a grave sin because it puts an end to innocent life"
(Misericordia et misera, n. 12).
But judging from what the newspapers reported the next day (see montage of headlines), it doesn't seem that his words found a mark:
one would say that the pope's decision had led to a banalization of abortion. Because as usual, most Italian reporters showed themselves to be quite superficial: but
if they understood the pope's statements this way, then how would the common folk understand it since they depend on the media to be informed? I think that this deserves some reflection.
When one wants to communicate a message, most of the time, words - no matter how clear they may be - do not suffice. They must be accompanied by 'signs' (which could be gestures, examples, prohibitions, punishments, etc). This is particularly obvious in the pedagogical field: It is difficult for education that is limited to 'preaching' to produce effective results. Parents who want to teach their children not to use profanities must teach them by example, not just saying so; and at the first vulgar term they hear from a child, they must immediately administer a spanking if they really want the child to learn once and for all that they must never use such words.
The Church, which is a great teacher, has always used this educational method. It is all the more important now, when with so much talk about 'pastoral conversion', certain obvious facts are forgotten.
Let's take a couple of examples:
- Until a few decades ago, Mass was always said in Latin. Why? Was it because the Church wanted the faithful to understand nothing about the rite or because she preferred to use a 'mysterious' language as if it were somehow 'magical'? No, only because the Church wished the faithful to understand that the sacraments act
ex opere operato - by their very performance, which is to say, they work intrinsically, independent of our understanding.
[More precisely, when validly effected, sacraments confer grace, not as the result of activity on the part of the recipient but by the power and promise of God.]
- Once, communion using both species (bread and wine) was forbidden. But why, when Jesus instituted the Eucharist using both bread and wine? Simply because we must understand that
in either specie, bread or wine, Christ is totally present - Body and Blood, spirit and divinity. (In this regard, it can be useful to read Nos 10-15 of the foreword to the General Order of the Roman Missal.)
But it seems that the Church today has lost the wisdom that has always distinguished it in the course of centuries. The Church today seems to have an allergy to any manifestation of severity - as if severity were incompatible with goodness, forgetting that it is an essential element in any formative process. [But severity is another word for 'rigidity', which is a No-No in the church of Bergoglio!]
One would say that today the only urgency is to show man the mercy of God. And certainly I would not object to such an affirmation. I am profoundly convinced that God nurtured saints like Sr. faustina Kowalska and John Paul II precisely to make the world know better the mystery of his mercy.
But divine mercy is not low-cost clemency - and anything that is cheap risks losing value in the eyes of men. A child will not take a too-indulgent teacher seriously. Whoever has gone to school knows that students have neither esteem or respect for professors who are too permissive.
Having lost its ancient wisdom, the Church today [really the church of Bergoglio, not the Catholic Church] is seeking to replace it with ideology.
Pope Francis has always been aware of this danger
[but he is nevertheless responsible more than anyone for turning the religion he preaches into implacable ideology that presumes to be infallible and the only right way]. In his Sept 2013 interview with
La Civilta Cattolica, he said:
If the Christian is restorationist, legalistic, if he wants everything to be clear and certain, then he will find nothing. Tradition and the memory of the past should help us to have the courage to open new spaces to God. Today, whoever seeks only disciplinary solutions, whoever tends in exaggerated manner towards doctrinal 'certainty'. whoever seeks obstinately to recuperate the lost past, has a static and involutive vision. In this way, the faith becomes an ideology like many others (pp 469-470).
[The narcissist never realizes, of course, when he is being guilty himself of the very things he presumes to denounce in others. One cannot cite any statement by a modern pope that is anywhere near as purely, rigidly ideological as the above.]
Then, in an interview published in
Avvenire on November 16, 2016, he reiterated:
With Lumen gentium, [the Church] went back to the source of her nature, to the Gospel. This displaced the axis of Christian conception from a certain legalism which could be ideological, to the Person of God who became mercy in the incarnation of his Son.
[As usual, Bergoglio distorts facts so cavalierly. When did the Gospel ever cease to be the source of the Church's teaching, and when was the 'Christian conception' ever 'a certain legalism which could be ideological'? What Bergoglio considers 'legalism' is simply the rightful insistence on following the Word of God, starting with the Ten Commandments, and not seek to find exemptions or exceptions to divine law!]
But a few days earlier, on November 11, in one of his morning homilettes at Casa Santa Marta, he admitted that even love can be transformed to ideology. And so can mercy, I might add!
Ideology does not mean something that is false in itself. In general, it is used to describe
a 'truth gone berserk', that is, uncoupled from its context, a partial truth that is absolutized but is disconnected from the other partial truths to which it is related.
For instance, are not justice and equality admirable values? But if they are isolated from other equally important values, such as freedom and legitimate pluralism, they become a cruel ideology.
Any truth is transformed to ideology especially when it loses contact with reality, when it forgets the limitations and the conditioning that characterize the human condition.
In the face of reality, ideology does not have the humility to adapt itself to reality but demands that reality adapt itself to it. [Which is the presumption underlying almost anything significant that Bergoglio says and does.]
Robespierre certainly had great ideals, but once he realized that the revolution was unable to make them reality, he had no better answer than to use the guillotine against those who did not share his ideology.
Papa Bergoglio ought to know this, since one of his guiding postulates is that "Reality is more important than ideas". In
Evangelii gaudium, he wrote that
"An idea detached from reality leads to ineffectual idealisms and nominalisms" (No. 232).
[Whatever that means! I really squirm when Bergoglio uses pseudo-intellectual language and he becomes even more incomprehensible.] To which I add,
an idea detached from reality becomes ideology.
And this can happen even in the Church, even with the most holy things which she is called on to propose and dispose. This happens
when an aspect of her preaching becomes 'de-contextualized' (=isolated from the rest of her dogma) and absolutized so that the rest are made to seem no longer important [as in the Bergoglian mercy-ueber-alles, and forget about repentance and 'sin no more'] or when her preaching
[that of her ministers, really] appears oblivious to reality or the actual persons she is concerned about.
Well, even the extension to all priests of the faculty to absolve abortion - with its presumption of demonstrating the mercy of God, but ignoring the fact that the faithful might well need some censure to make them realize the gravity of the sin [and crime] - could be a sign of the progressive ideologization of the Church
[under this pope].
You want 'signs' - as Fr. Scalese says above - on Bergoglio's real position on abortion? His continuing lip service denouncing abortion as a truly grave sin sounds more and more perfunctory in the light of reports like the following. Read and weep! Morality is a question of black or white, but obviously Bergoglio subscribes to the school of 'fifty shades of grey'.
Francis praises major 'Humanae Vitae' dissenter
as he rebukes ‘white or black’ morality
by Pete Baklinski
ROME, November 24, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis has praised the 1960s German moral theologian Bernard Häring, one of the most prominent dissenters from Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical
Humanae Vitae, for his new morality which the pope said helped “moral theology to flourish.”
"I think Bernard Häring was the first to start looking for a new way to help moral theology to flourish again," he said in comments, published today by
La Civiltà Cattolica, that were given during a dialogue with the Jesuit order which was gathered for its 36th general Congregation on October 24, 2016 in Rome.
Pope Francis gave his comments while answering a question about a morality he has often spoken about based on “discernment.”
“Discernment is the key element: the capacity for discernment. I note the absence of discernment in the formation of priests. We run the risk of getting used to 'white or black,' to that which is legal. We are rather closed, in general, to discernment. One thing is clear: today, in a certain number of seminaries, a rigidity that is far from a discernment of situations has been introduced. And that is dangerous, because it can lead us to a conception of morality that has a casuistic sense,” he said.
[Look who is talking about casuistry! Dear JMB, know yourself!]
Francis criticized what he called a “decadent scholasticism” that his generation was educated in, that provoked what he called a “casuistic attitude” towards morality.
“The whole moral sphere was restricted to ‘you can,’ ‘you cannot,’ ‘up to here yes. but not there,’” he said. “It was a morality very foreign to ‘discernment,’" he said, adding that Bernard Häring was the “first to start looking for a new way to help moral theology to flourish again.”
Fr. Bernard Häring (1912-98) was a key figure during the Second Vatican Council, where he applied the principle of the evolution of dogma (as found in
nouvelle théologie) to morality. According to Professor Roberto de Mattei,
this “new morality” championed by Häring ultimately “denied the existence of an absolute and immutable natural law.”
Häring was first appointed an “expert” at Vatican II and then later became the secretary of the Commission on the modern world, where, according to de Mattei, he became one of the primary architects of the document
Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), part of which deals with marriage.
According to de Mattei, a vicious battle was waged during the crafting of this document between the progressive and traditional minorities over procreation in marriage.
“This battle went beyond the pill to include the ends of marriage. At issue was the very basis of natural law itself,” he said in a talk given at the Rome Life Forum in 2015.
The progressive element, backed by Häring, eventually prevailed upon Pope Paul VI to leave aside the question of contraception in the document, according to de Mattei.
“The most surprising aspect of Gaudium et Spes, however, is the lack of any presentation of the traditional order of the ends of marriage, the primary and the secondary….The institution of marriage, therefore, is defined without any reference to children and only as an intimate community of conjugal life. Moreover, in the succeeding paragraphs, conjugal love is discussed first (paragraph 49) and procreation second (paragraph 50),” said de Mattei.
After Paul VI released
Humanae Vitae in 1968 where he taught unequivocally that “each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of human life” and called the use of contraception “intrinsically wrong,”
Häring spent his energy in criticizing not only Paul VI, but also Pope John Paul II, for their stances on birth control and other sexual issues.
Häring was eventually investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in the 1970s for his 1972 book
Medical Ethics, where he presents a concept of health that would allow a couple to use contraception if they deemed it the best means to help them fulfill their total vocation, a principle condemned in
Humanae Vitae.
Häring became the mentor of Charles Curran, a dissident Catholic priest who aggressively condemned the Church’s teachings on matters such as abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. Curran, who was also investigated by the CDF in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was officially prohibited by Pope John Paul II in 1986 from teaching at any Catholic school and was stripped of the title ‘Catholic theologian.’
Francis called it an “important task” of the Society of Jesus that they “form seminarians and priests in the morality of ‘discernment.’”
It was using the method of “discernment” in response to the Zika virus scare earlier this year that Pope Francis appeared to condone the use of contraception for married couples living in affected areas as the “lesser of two evils.”
Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi confirmed the pope’s words the following day, stating:
“The contraceptive or condom, in particular cases of emergency or gravity, could be the object of ‘discernment’ in a serious case of conscience. This is what the Pope said.” Critics said the pope’s move contradicted previous Catholic teaching.
Pope Francis also spoke about the morality of “discernment” in his April exhortation Amoris Laetitia more than thirty times, using the term as a key to opening the door to Holy Communion for Catholics living in adulterous situations.
Immediately following the “smoking footnote” 351, in which critics say the pope allows the divorced and remarried to receive Holy Communion, the pope writes that “discernment must help to find possible ways of responding to God and growing in the midst of limits.”
Four cardinals have recently asked the pope to clarify key passages in the exhortation, asking him a set of five yes-or-no questions regarding the indissolubility of marriage, the existence of absolute moral norms, and the role of conscience in making decisions. They went public with their “dubia” last week after the pope failed to reply.
During his dialogue with the Jesuits,
Pope Francis noted the progress that has been made in moral theology since the days of “you can, you cannot.”
“Obviously, in our day moral theology has made much progress in its reflections and in its maturity,” he said. [Once again, as in AL, Bergoglio totally ignores John Paul II's Veritatis splendor (which Benedict XVI considers as probably the sainted pope's most important encyclical) reaffirming the unchanging norms of Catholic morality. He obviously cannot cite a document that contradicts much of his own heterodox morality.] [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/11/2016 02:08]