M
McCall1981
Guest
Between the Synods: Testing the Catholicity of our Faith
May 01, 2015
What will be the outcome of the Synod? There are signs both positive and disquieting.
Fr. D. Vincent Twomey
When asked about the Synod’s hot-button issues in a TV interview conducted on March 6 last and broadcast on the Mexican Televista on the 12th of March, Pope Francis responded with the statement: “I believe that there are disproportionate expectations” (desmesuradas). He went on to intimate that Communion for remarried divorcees was not on the cards. In other public statements, he highlighted “the ideological colonization of the family” as a very serious problem and, in the same interview, went on to mention “gender” theory, “which is something that is pulverizing the family.” The Vaticanista, Sandro Magister, compiled an anthology of some 21 texts taken from statements made by the Pope since the Extraordinary Synod last October. They cover such issues as contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexual marriage, “gender” ideology, euthanasia, and were mostly ignored by the media. His 21 statements over a five-month period, according to Magister, do not differ one inch from the stance taken by his predecessors, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI (though they perhaps lack their precision). “And yet,” Magister comments, “in dominant opinion, both secular and Catholic, this pope passes as an innovator who changes paradigms and breaks with the dogmas of the past, also and above all on questions of life and death that were the cross of his predecessors.”
This dominant opinion, it seems to me, has created an ethos within the Church that, on the one hand, gives encouragement to the 1968-type so-called “liberals,” and, on the other hand, causes dismay among Catholics trying to remain faithful to the Magisterium…
Wood concludes: “Sure, he [Pope Francis] has expressed support for the way in which Cardinal Kasper wrote on marriage and the family, but he has never publicly and definitively endorsed what Cardinal Kasper said.” In fact, as I mentioned earlier, less than two weeks ago Pope Francis seemed to have ruled out that possibility.
Is it possible that Cardinal Reinhard Marx, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, has seen the writing on the wall? At a recent press conference after a meeting of the bishops, the cardinal archbishop of Munich commented with regard to Communion for the divorced and remarried: “We are not a subsidiary of Rome. Every episcopal conference is responsible for pastoral care within its own sphere. We cannot wait for a synod to tell us how we should act here in marriage and the family.” This, of course, raises more fundamental questions, such as the catholicity of the Church, to which I will return…
catholicworldreport.com/Item/3850/between_the_synods_testing_the_catholicity_of_our_faith.aspx
May 01, 2015
What will be the outcome of the Synod? There are signs both positive and disquieting.
Fr. D. Vincent Twomey
When asked about the Synod’s hot-button issues in a TV interview conducted on March 6 last and broadcast on the Mexican Televista on the 12th of March, Pope Francis responded with the statement: “I believe that there are disproportionate expectations” (desmesuradas). He went on to intimate that Communion for remarried divorcees was not on the cards. In other public statements, he highlighted “the ideological colonization of the family” as a very serious problem and, in the same interview, went on to mention “gender” theory, “which is something that is pulverizing the family.” The Vaticanista, Sandro Magister, compiled an anthology of some 21 texts taken from statements made by the Pope since the Extraordinary Synod last October. They cover such issues as contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexual marriage, “gender” ideology, euthanasia, and were mostly ignored by the media. His 21 statements over a five-month period, according to Magister, do not differ one inch from the stance taken by his predecessors, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI (though they perhaps lack their precision). “And yet,” Magister comments, “in dominant opinion, both secular and Catholic, this pope passes as an innovator who changes paradigms and breaks with the dogmas of the past, also and above all on questions of life and death that were the cross of his predecessors.”
This dominant opinion, it seems to me, has created an ethos within the Church that, on the one hand, gives encouragement to the 1968-type so-called “liberals,” and, on the other hand, causes dismay among Catholics trying to remain faithful to the Magisterium…
Wood concludes: “Sure, he [Pope Francis] has expressed support for the way in which Cardinal Kasper wrote on marriage and the family, but he has never publicly and definitively endorsed what Cardinal Kasper said.” In fact, as I mentioned earlier, less than two weeks ago Pope Francis seemed to have ruled out that possibility.
Is it possible that Cardinal Reinhard Marx, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, has seen the writing on the wall? At a recent press conference after a meeting of the bishops, the cardinal archbishop of Munich commented with regard to Communion for the divorced and remarried: “We are not a subsidiary of Rome. Every episcopal conference is responsible for pastoral care within its own sphere. We cannot wait for a synod to tell us how we should act here in marriage and the family.” This, of course, raises more fundamental questions, such as the catholicity of the Church, to which I will return…
catholicworldreport.com/Item/3850/between_the_synods_testing_the_catholicity_of_our_faith.aspx