The following might well be a pendant to Edward Pentin’s blogpost from yesterday about AL…
Cardinals, collegiality and Amoris Laetitia
June 19, 2017
Collegiality did not wait to be invented by Vatican II. In the 1950s, Papa Pacelli, Pius XII, wrote to each bishop of the Catholic Church to ask (1) whether he believed in the Corporal Assumption of the Mother of God; and (2) whether he considered it opportune for the dogma to be defined. The subsequent Solemn Definition followed upon the overwhelming consensus apparent in the replies of the world-wide episcopate.
More than a year has passed since the emergence of the divisive and poorly drafted document called Amoris laetitia. In this time,
many bishops and episcopal conferences [Some’, perhaps ‘ a few’, to be more accurate, certainly not ‘many!] have issued guidelines making clear that
nothing has changed since S John Paul II in Familiaris consortio, and Pope Benedict XVI in Sacramentum Caritatis, reemphasised the Church's immemorial discipline: 'remarried' divorcees who will not repent of their adultery and undertake either to separate or at least to try, with the help of God's grace, to cohabit chastely, exclude themselves from the Sacraments during the time of their impenitence.
A few conferences and Bishops have issued statements understood as meaning that the thusly impenitent may, by virtue of Amoris laetitia, receive the Sacraments. Yet other conferences, such as that in England and Wales, have been manifestly unable to agree among themselves.
It is clear that the Universal Episcopate is not united behind a 'German' interpretation of Amoris laetitia. Very far from it. [Perhaps this should be qualified to say that the overwhelming majority of the world’s bishops have chosen not to go on the record, i.e., not documented in words written or oral, about that they think of the controversial propositions in AL, perhaps mostly because they do not want to rock the Bergoglio boat in anyway – for careerist reasons, or otherwise – but one suspects most of them will go ahead anyway to implement the equivocal statements in AL in the way that Bergoglio has always intended them to be understood, i.e., ignoring all previous Magisterium on the matter of marriage, adultery and the sacraments, in favor of leniency for all.]
In the context of the Unity of the
Una Catholica and of the collegial nature of the Universal Episcopate,
cum et sub Petro, the time has surely come for this 'dialogue' to be moved to a new stage.
Manifestly, if we are to persist with the embarrassing notion that we belong to one Church with one Teaching about the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, steps must be taken to move in the direction of coherence, harmony, and united witness.
The idea that someone who is excluded from the Sacraments by his own impenitent rejection of the Gospel needs only to walk across the border between Poland and Germany, or from one American diocese to another, to be welcomed enthusiastically as a communicant in good standing, is obviously
a profoundly unCatholic absurdity which needs speedily to be resolved.
Indeed, if one of Bishop Lopes's Ordinariate parishes in America were geographically within a 'liberal' Cupichoid, diocese, the dissonance between the two in doctrine and discipline would be even more ludicrous.
The time has surely come for the Four Cardinals who intervened last year with their Dubia to revisit the question.
[Revisit? The questions over AL – crystallized in the DUBIA – have never been taken off the table, or out of sight, since that document from Hell was first published.]
And the time for Bishops, Successors of the Apostles according to the teaching of Leo XIII and of Vatican II and not mere vicars of the Roman Pontiff, to speak with courage, clarity and unanimity. And for clergy, laity, and academics to do the same.
[And what are we to do when the man elected to lead the Church in 2013 has consistently refused to do his duty to ‘confirm his brethren in the faith’, as Jesus mandated the first Peter? Besides keeping any and all DUBIA about his statements and actions alive and well-ventilated, all we can do is to continue living our lives and fulfilling our Catholic duties according to the deposit of the faith, which we can well do, with the grace of God and the ministry of faithful bishops and priests, while ignoring the existence of a man whose acts of apostasy are inexorably mounting!]
Remember that, at the height of the Arian Crisis, it was not among the Bishops or even in Rome that the Faith was most conspicuously preserved and defended. Remember the careful and lucid teaching of Blessed John Henry Newman, beloved Patron of our English Ordinariate, on the Suspense of the Magisterium.
Parrhesia, boldness in witnessing to the Truth, a virtue which was once (only a couple of years ago ... it seems like an eternity, doesn't it?) so very incessantly on the lips of the current occupant of the Roman See, is surely still an obligation for all faithful Catholics.
[It certainly is, especially when the ENEMY is not just wantonly parrhesic but also pathologically logorrheic!]
The more who speak boldly, the more difficult it will be for individuals to be put under unsympathetic pressure.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/06/2017 00:20]