Bishop: Pastors Must Deny Funerals to Catholics in Same-Gender Marriages

[edwest2]

First, by accepting abc, which leads to a sex-as-leisure activity rather than a sacramental re-commitment, straights destroyed the boundaries of marriage. If you have a fairly reliable form of abc, then you don’t have to worry about having sex outside of marriage.

Second, no-fault divorce destroyed the entire idea of marriage as some sort of contract. Marriage became the only contract with no penalties for the person who withdraws from the contract.

So what was left to destroy by the time SSM was brought up? What argument could be brought against SSM?

I was not surprised…

The first paragraph is totally false. The second paragraph is false and misleading.

To quote a priest: “Same sex marriage is impossible!”

SSM is a legal fiction.

Ed

 

[billy15]

St Francis:

Bishop McGrath says Bishop Paprocki’s statements are “confusing.” What about McGrath’s? What does presenting oneself “in good faith” mean? What are the criteria? How does he get to change the perennial teaching of the Church and the words of inspired Scripture?

Bishop P seems to have said (I haven’t found his text) that those in SS marriages, like other manifest sinners, will be denied a Catholic funeral. That seems clear and unambiguous. We have a well-established understanding of the criteria for this.

Of course, when members of the hierarchy violate or disregard those rules, it gives rise to confusion. Why should Kennedy get a big ol’ Catholic funeral and Joe and Moe be denied?

I would imagine it’s the same standard as someone who presents themselves for communion. If they’re presenting themselves, it’s presumed they’re worthy to receive. If not that’s between them and God.

There’s already a topic about this going on, concerning Bishop McGrath’s short statement. I think it;s kind of hard to compare worthiness for Holy Communion here with an ordinary not allowing a Rite of Christian Burial.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=1056986

edwest2:

SSM is a legal fiction.

Absolutely right. However, that doesn’t make St Francis’ other two paragraphs false. He’s right on, actually. These are the three pillars of marriage: exclusivity, permanence, and fecundity. Starting in the mid-20th century, the culture started to reject all three pillars of marriage. Birth control became the norm, swingers had no shame, and no fault divorce has run rampant. This clearly opened the door for the falsehood of same-sex marriage. Once you disconnect procreation from sex, and no longer see marriage as something permanent or exclusive, it’s easy to justify homosexual unions. It’s not the “gay marriage” movement that has led to the corrosion of marriage in our culture; that corrosion has been in full swing since the 1960’s thanks to heterosexuals that disregarded the three traditional pillars of marriage.

There was an awesome, very well written article that came out a couple of years ago, and as it touches on the same points that St Francis made, we see the essay also has a lot of truth:

The Protohomosexual

"Long before anyone dreamed of normalizing sodomy, heterosexual ideology contended that sex should be first and foremost recreation. The only problem with this contention is that sex is naturally creative. But as heterosexual ideology evolved, so did technology: with latex, the right surgical procedures and chemicals, it became possible to believe that sex is firstly recreation…

"The slow evolution of the heterosexual is in fact the emergence of the homosexual. With the flattering image reflected in the beloved’s eyes, homosexuality is just another version of Courtly Love. The cultural acceptance of sodomy, so obviously sterile and unfruitful, only legitimizes the belief that sex is recreation. Same-sex “marriage” reinforces the value system of no-fault divorce by affirming the belief that marriage is not primarily about commitment and children but about happiness; it simply joins the long heterosexual tradition of seeing marriage as a vehicle for rebellion.

"To claim that homosexual behavior is wrong would be to hold others to a moral standard to which one’s own heterosexual behavior does not conform. Whether bi-, homo-, hetero-, all forms of hyphenated sexuality want the same thing: sex without moral or generative limits, relationships without cultural or familial constraints. We are in flight from sexuality and we are using sex as the vehicle for that flight.

“Who is the protohomosexual? He is you and me.”

 

[St_Francis]

The first paragraph is totally false. The second paragraph is false and misleading.

Perhaps you would be kind enough to elaborate on the correct information?

To quote a priest: “Same sex marriage is impossible!”

SSM is a legal fiction.

Ed

Sorry about that. Usually I put the M in quotations.

 

[edwest2]

There’s already a topic about this going on, concerning Bishop McGrath’s short statement. I think it;s kind of hard to compare worthiness for Holy Communion here with an ordinary not allowing a Rite of Christian Burial.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=1056986

Absolutely right. However, that doesn’t make St Francis’ other two paragraphs false. He’s right on, actually. These are the three pillars of marriage: exclusivity, permanence, and fecundity. Starting in the mid-20th century, the culture started to reject all three pillars of marriage. Birth control became the norm, swingers had no shame, and no fault divorce has run rampant. This clearly opened the door for the falsehood of same-sex marriage. Once you disconnect procreation from sex, and no longer see marriage as something permanent or exclusive, it’s easy to justify homosexual unions. It’s not the “gay marriage” movement that has led to the corrosion of marriage in our culture; that corrosion has been in full swing since the 1960’s thanks to heterosexuals that disregarded the three traditional pillars of marriage.

There was an awesome, very well written article that came out a couple of years ago, and as it touches on the same points that St Francis made, we see the essay also has a lot of truth:

This was carefully engineered to happen by outside groups. I can name them and certain individuals. This was NOT, under any circumstance, a “happened by itself” kind of thing. It was a coordinated attack by very dedicated groups. People did not just wake up one day and say, “I know. I’m going to abandon the pillars of marriage.” That is so misleading. This degenerate plan was prepared by sexual degenerates.

Pope Benedict:

"Pope Benedict XVI on Society and Truth

"Today at the Practical Catholic, we’ll be looking with Pope Benedict at the erosion happening in societies across the world and what Christians can do in response. So here we have a few Pope Benedict XVI quotes from various sources to help us along the way.

"The Holy Father says:

"If we cannot have common values, common truths, sufficient communication on the essentials of human life–how to live how to respond to the great challenges of human life–then true society becomes impossible."

Commentary by the Practical Catholic:

"How true this is. Where there is no communication, no culture, no shared experience, there is no society; because there is no people. There remains only a vast and foreboding, unforgiving sea of individuals ready to crash upon each other and the world with the slightest wind. Without a common basis, we have not the vaulted pluralism we’re taught to embrace, but Babel, in all the confusion and madness of a society with no binding forces. Already we are seeing the tensions of this fragmentation breaking out across cultures.

“Without common values and truths, such as in the socieites we find ourselves in, we find the fabric of society torn like Joseph’s cloak, by a great many tribes which would like to lay claim to the title of favored. Leftists, conservatives, anarchists, nihilists, secularists, objectivists, the shallow, the entertainers, the entertained, all vying for control against each other. Tribalism can indeed spawn differentiation, but without some common ground, and in the face of increasing jargon not only in the academies but in the cultures; we shall be left with madness. In the end this tribalism can only result in the decline of all their claims, and the alienation of one from the other. Babel is the happenstance when society tries to become God.”

"In 1968, in the midst of the marketing of The Pill and the Sexual Revolution, Pope Paul VI issued a clear encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Here was the reaction:

"Within 24 hours, in an event unprecedented in the history of the Church, more than 200 dissenting theologians signed a full-page ad in The New York Times in protest. Not only did they declare their disagreement with encyclical’s teaching; they went one step further, far beyond their authority as theologians, and actually encouraged dissent among the lay faithful.

"They asserted the following: “Therefore, as Roman Catholic theologians, conscious of our duty and our limitations, we conclude that spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the values and sacredness of marriage.”

“… an event unprecedented in the history of the Church…”

Source: Regnum Christi

Ed

 

[Tantum_ergo]

And yet they’re not typically.

And yet, two wrongs don’t make a right.

The way to address the situation is not to say, “Well, golly gee whiz, we haven’t been doing a great job in education and so one ‘group’ doesn’t know it shouldn’t receive, and because of that, another group that jolly well did know it should not receive is going to use that failure of teaching to try to argue that they should receive as well”. . .

but rather, “Yes, individuals in the Church haven’t been as good about teaching this in the last couple of decades, apparently, to ‘straights’ as they were to ‘gays’, that people in objective mortal sin should not receive communion. So now we’re going to work harder in education and let everybody, gay and straight and in between, know that you must not receive the Eucharist in a state of sin. AND we’re going to go back to the basics and start explaining that yes, Virginia, there is a devil. Yes, boys and girls, there is sin out there that kills your soul. No waffles, no thinking you have to be 'as bad as Hitler”,no complaining that ‘things change’ or that it might be ‘ok for you but not me’. And yes, you don’t need to be have the theology degree, or be a member of MENSA, in order to have full knowledge that a sin is mortal. You don’t need to be completely ‘free’ of any possible ‘coercion’ to give full consent. And if people get offended, tough toenails. Better to be offended here than frying, um, ‘down there’.

You’re not going to be ‘saved’ by trying to convince yourself that "we didn’t really know the full story, so we aren’t guilty’. If that were the case, then why did Jesus come at all? Seriously, why did He? Humanity sure as hades didn’t ‘really know’ how evil they were, so if ignorance is salvation, why did Jesus have to save us?

If we were going to be ‘saved’ because we could claim we didn’t give full consent, why did Jesus come? Seriously, how many people historically were out there stating, “I am now going to go and sin my guts out ha ha ha”? Most people did exactly what we do now, trying either to convince themselves, "It’s not really that bad’, ‘everybody is doing it’, “It’s expected”, ‘I’ll repent later’, "I was a little drunk’, "I didn’t really mean to go that far’, yadda yadda.

If there really isn’t anything that is sinful at all, but only things which people are more or less culpable for, and which ‘change’ according to societal standards, such that at any given time ‘sin’ is something that might have existed ‘in the past’ but doesn’t now, why did Jesus come 2000 years ago? Didn’t He know that in AD 2017 we’d be so much past the old ‘sinful humans’ that only a few misguided people are still out there harming the environment and being mean? Why ‘save’ humanity if humans really don’t do anything that is all that wrong to begin with? If all those ‘old sins’ aren’t really sins, why come to save us ‘then’ instead of coming and just ‘nudging’ the few diehard conservat. . .I mean, the few ‘protestors’ out there into the happy fold of "Lord aren’t we wonderful’ land?

 

[JimG]

There was an awesome, very well written article that came out a couple of years ago, and as it touches on the same points that St Francis made, we see the essay also has a lot of truth:

Besides the part you quoted, allow me to quote a few more paragraphs from the linked article, The Protohomosexual:

Why are so many straight people pro gay? Because the normalization of homosexuality is the premier achievement of heterosexual ideology. “Gay” and “straight” are not taxonomies but ideologies. They are not orientations but disorientations: whether bi-, homo-, or hetero-, hyphenated sexuality makes us lose our sense of direction toward the truly sexual, and the victims of such ideology are children.

(It cannot go without mentioning that artificial contraception was considered to be immoral by all Christians, Protestant and Catholics alike, in all places and at all times, until the Lambeth Conference of 1930. Within a single generation a universal and unbroken Christian ethic was blanketed, smothered, and left for dead. The condemnation of what Martin Luther considered an act “far more atrocious than incest or adultery” is now considered to be a Catholic quirk.)

 

[St_Francis]

This was carefully engineered to happen by outside groups. I can name them and certain individuals. This was NOT, under any circumstance, a “happened by itself” kind of thing. It was a coordinated attack by very dedicated groups. People did not just wake up one day and say, “I know. I’m going to abandon the pillars of marriage.” That is so misleading. This degenerate plan was prepared by sexual degenerates.

Pope Benedict:

"Pope Benedict XVI on Society and Truth

"Today at the Practical Catholic, we’ll be looking with Pope Benedict at the erosion happening in societies across the world and what Christians can do in response. So here we have a few Pope Benedict XVI quotes from various sources to help us along the way.

"The Holy Father says:

"If we cannot have common values, common truths, sufficient communication on the essentials of human life–how to live how to respond to the great challenges of human life–then true society becomes impossible."

Commentary by the Practical Catholic:

"How true this is. Where there is no communication, no culture, no shared experience, there is no society; because there is no people. There remains only a vast and foreboding, unforgiving sea of individuals ready to crash upon each other and the world with the slightest wind. Without a common basis, we have not the vaulted pluralism we’re taught to embrace, but Babel, in all the confusion and madness of a society with no binding forces. Already we are seeing the tensions of this fragmentation breaking out across cultures.

“Without common values and truths, such as in the socieites we find ourselves in, we find the fabric of society torn like Joseph’s cloak, by a great many tribes which would like to lay claim to the title of favored. Leftists, conservatives, anarchists, nihilists, secularists, objectivists, the shallow, the entertainers, the entertained, all vying for control against each other. Tribalism can indeed spawn differentiation, but without some common ground, and in the face of increasing jargon not only in the academies but in the cultures; we shall be left with madness. In the end this tribalism can only result in the decline of all their claims, and the alienation of one from the other. Babel is the happenstance when society tries to become God.”

"In 1968, in the midst of the marketing of The Pill and the Sexual Revolution, Pope Paul VI issued a clear encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Here was the reaction:

"Within 24 hours, in an event unprecedented in the history of the Church, more than 200 dissenting theologians signed a full-page ad in The New York Times in protest. Not only did they declare their disagreement with encyclical’s teaching; they went one step further, far beyond their authority as theologians, and actually encouraged dissent among the lay faithful.

"They asserted the following: “Therefore, as Roman Catholic theologians, conscious of our duty and our limitations, we conclude that spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the values and sacredness of marriage.”

“… an event unprecedented in the history of the Church…”

Source: Regnum Christi

Ed

I can agree with all that. The events certainly have the earmarks of a plan, whether a plan conceived and put into place by supernatural or human enemies.

However, the fact remains that most of us in the West fell for it, we did not draw the line, we did not resist in any way. The conspiracy, regardless of source, could not have succeeded without the voluntary cooperation of the rest of us.

 

[St_Francis]

And yet, two wrongs don’t make a right.

The way to address the situation is not to say, “Well, golly gee whiz, we haven’t been doing a great job in education and so one ‘group’ doesn’t know it shouldn’t receive, and because of that, another group that jolly well did know it should not receive is going to use that failure of teaching to try to argue that they should receive as well”. . .

but rather, “Yes, individuals in the Church haven’t been as good about teaching this in the last couple of decades, apparently, to ‘straights’ as they were to ‘gays’, that people in objective mortal sin should not receive communion. So now we’re going to work harder in education and let everybody, gay and straight and in between, know that you must not receive the Eucharist in a state of sin. AND we’re going to go back to the basics and start explaining that yes, Virginia, there is a devil. Yes, boys and girls, there is sin out there that kills your soul. No waffles, no thinking you have to be 'as bad as Hitler”,no complaining that ‘things change’ or that it might be ‘ok for you but not me’. And yes, you don’t need to be have the theology degree, or be a member of MENSA, in order to have full knowledge that a sin is mortal. You don’t need to be completely ‘free’ of any possible ‘coercion’ to give full consent. And if people get offended, tough toenails. Better to be offended here than frying, um, ‘down there’.

You’re not going to be ‘saved’ by trying to convince yourself that "we didn’t really know the full story, so we aren’t guilty’. If that were the case, then why did Jesus come at all? Seriously, why did He? Humanity sure as hades didn’t ‘really know’ how evil they were, so if ignorance is salvation, why did Jesus have to save us?

If we were going to be ‘saved’ because we could claim we didn’t give full consent, why did Jesus come? Seriously, how many people historically were out there stating, “I am now going to go and sin my guts out ha ha ha”? Most people did exactly what we do now, trying either to convince themselves, "It’s not really that bad’, ‘everybody is doing it’, “It’s expected”, ‘I’ll repent later’, "I was a little drunk’, "I didn’t really mean to go that far’, yadda yadda.

If there really isn’t anything that is sinful at all, but only things which people are more or less culpable for, and which ‘change’ according to societal standards, such that at any given time ‘sin’ is something that might have existed ‘in the past’ but doesn’t now, why did Jesus come 2000 years ago? Didn’t He know that in AD 2017 we’d be so much past the old ‘sinful humans’ that only a few misguided people are still out there harming the environment and being mean? Why ‘save’ humanity if humans really don’t do anything that is all that wrong to begin with? If all those ‘old sins’ aren’t really sins, why come to save us ‘then’ instead of coming and just ‘nudging’ the few diehard conservat. . .I mean, the few ‘protestors’ out there into the happy fold of "Lord aren’t we wonderful’ land?

Thanks for putting into words some thoughts I too have been grappling with.

 

[edwest2]

I can agree with all that. The events certainly have the earmarks of a plan, whether a plan conceived and put into place by supernatural or human enemies.

However, the fact remains that most of us in the West fell for it, we did not draw the line, we did not resist in any way. The conspiracy, regardless of source, could not have succeeded without the voluntary cooperation of the rest of us.

Do you know anything about psychological warfare or slow-acting poison? Do you know anything about the named events of the last 40 years? Wolves in sheep’s clothing. It was coordinated, well documented and carried out by professionals. Get a good manual on military psychological warfare techniques and focus on the roles of fake people on the ground, misleading and false media, and attacks and actions designed to confuse and disrupt. A few of which never happened but are the scapegoats of today. “They did it!” No, you did it. Don’t blame them.

More false statements. Some of us used zero illegal drugs. Some of never shacked up. Some of us abandoned porn. And some of were approached by attractive young women for no relationship required, casual sex and said no.

I guarantee you. If Two and a Half Men were on TV right after Ozzie and Harriet in the 1960s, heads would have rolled. Have you heard of the Legion of Decency? Do you know what it did?

Ed

 

[St_Francis]

Do you know anything about psychological warfare or slow-acting poison? Do you know anything about the named events of the last 40 years? Wolves in sheep’s clothing. It was coordinated, well documented and carried out by professionals. Get a good manual on military psychological warfare techniques and focus on the roles of fake people on the ground, misleading and false media, and attacks and actions designed to confuse and disrupt. A few of which never happened but are the scapegoats of today. “They did it!” No, you did it. Don’t blame them.

More false statements. Some of us used zero illegal drugs. Some of never shacked up. Some of us abandoned porn. And some of were approached by attractive young women for no relationship required, casual sex and said no.

I guarantee you. If Two and a Half Men were on TV right after Ozzie and Harriet in the 1960s, heads would have rolled. Have you heard of the Legion of Decency? Do you know what it did?

Ed

Why are you arguing with me? I said I could believe there was a plan.

I used the word most, not all, when talking about the people who fell for it. And by that I mean that even those who didn’t get into sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll still acquiesced. Many people who would never dream of doing those things in their own lives still did not stand against it; they just thought it wasn’t for them personally.

So, say there was a plan instead of a random series of unfortunate events: what difference does that make? How should we act differently if it is one and not the other?

 

[Lucretius]

They must also ban divorced and remarried Catholics who have not received annulments, women who has or man who fathers a child out of wedlock, members of straight couples who are living together before marriage, and anyone using birth control. For those are all against church teaching as well. Moreover, they must ban anyone who does not care for the poor, or care for the environment, and anyone who supports torture, for those are church teachings too. More basically, they must ban people who are not loving, not forgiving and not merciful, for these represent the teachings of Jesus, the most fundamental of all church teachings. To focus only on LGBT people, without a similar focus on the moral and sexual behavior of straight people is, in the words of the Catechism, a “sign of unjust discrimination” (2358).

Here’s a thought: fornication, engaging in homosexual acts, or even having a homosexual relationship, can be interpreted as, at least in part, resulting from human weakness, but entering in a homosexual marriage can not. Two homosexuals don’t become married by accident, out of weakness, or because of circumstances, but because they want to glorify their homosexual relationship.

In other words, we can see the bishop’s binding as concerned not with sexual scandal per se, but rather with explicit and public denial of the teachings of the Gospel on homosexuality and marriage.

Christi pax.