Papal exhortation avoids clear statement on Communion

[OraLabora]

But some here are suggesting that the Pope intended to say that those in irregular marital situations could receive the sacraments while continuing to have sex with the person to whom they consider themselves married.

In exceptional circumstances, not as a general rule.

 

[St_Francis]

Which again is not what AL is doing. Which is the topic of this discussion.

Moreover the “controversial” parts of AL are not directed towards us, but towards our pastors. Any plain reading of AL would show that the Holy Father wants to bring those in irregular relationships back to the fullness of revealed Truth, not to wallow in their sin.

But some here are suggesting that the Pope intended to say that those in irregular marital situations could receive the sacraments while continuing to have sex with the person to whom they consider themselves married.

Personally, I think that given the strong teachings and consequent discipline in the past, the Pope would not make such a change in the footnote of an exhortation, which is why I believe that the intention of the Pope’s comment there is unclear.

He is asking his pastors to help them chart a path back to Truth, by discerning their circumstances and what steps are possible to move forward, one step at a time. One assumes if they are sitting in front of a priest to go through that process, there actually is a measure of repentance.

And the past teaching of the Church would indicate that a part of that path would be to eschew marital relations with a non-spouse.

 

[TMC]

I clearly don’t understand the moral complexity of these situations. It would help if you could give an example of such a situation where the moral choice is difficult to make. I don’t do well with vagueness and generalities.

Ender

Life is filled with vagueness and generalities, and this thread has over 800 posts full of them. Every divorced and remarried person has his or her own story of how they came to be in that place. Each one of them is an example.

 

[OraLabora]

Life is filled with vagueness and generalities, and this thread has over 800 posts full of them. Every divorced and remarried person has his or her own story of how they came to be in that place. Each one of them is an example.

I can’t help but think that people that demand clarity in everything about life must be profoundly unhappy people, because clarity is just about the last thing to expect in any part of life touched by humans, and that includes the Church.

I remember arguing with someone on another forum who was proposing that the solution to “messy” Catholicism was a smaller and purer Church as once mused by the Holy Father Emeritus.

I fear that if we attempted to have a smaller, purer Church, the end result would be a small messy Church instead of a large one, and I don’t think that would serve anyone’s salvation and moreover it would just end up being a private club. Human nature is such that we usually manage to make a mess in large groups, or small; “là où il y a l’homme, il y a l’hommerie”.

Fortunately the Holy Father seems to not mind “large and messy”, to try to get as many people as possible, onto the Gospel message, no matter where they are in life.

 

[dans0622]

I clearly don’t understand the moral complexity of these situations. It would help if you could give an example of such a situation where the moral choice is difficult to make. I don’t do well with vagueness and generalities.

I’ll put forth a kind of situation I think is about as complex and difficult as it gets:

A baby boy is baptized Catholic in infancy but not raised in the faith. He contracts a civil marriage with a divorced, non-Catholic and has a few children. As far as he’s concerned, everything in his pagan life is great. Ten years into the union, he has an awakening to his Catholic faith and wants to begin practicing it, including regularizing his marital state: he realizes that the Church does not consider him to be married and so he is not to act as a married man.

The other Party thinks all of this is ridiculous and has no intention whatsoever to become Catholic or even abide by the teaching of the Church. She thinks that the man has no right to impose any restriction on her exercise of her own rights as a wife. Acrimony ensues. The man then tells his priest that the woman will take the kids and leave if he “keeps going on like this.”

Dan

 

[clem456]

I’ll put forth a kind of situation I think is about as complex and difficult as it gets:

A baby boy is baptized Catholic in infancy but not raised in the faith. He contracts a civil marriage with a divorced, non-Catholic and has a few children. As far as he’s concerned, everything in his pagan life is great. Ten years into the union, he has an awakening to his Catholic faith and wants to begin practicing it, including regularizing his marital state: he realizes that the Church does not consider him to be married and so he is not to act as a married man.

The other Party thinks all of this is ridiculous and has no intention whatsoever to become Catholic or even abide by the teaching of the Church. She thinks that the man has no right to impose any restriction on her exercise of her own rights as a wife. Acrimony ensues. The man then tells his priest that the woman will take the kids and leave if he “keeps going on like this.”

Dan

Can you say “duress”?

I don’t pretend to have a smart answer, but thanks for putting forth for consideration the kind of messy situations that are out there.

 

[St_Francis]

I can’t help but think that people that demand clarity in everything about life must be profoundly unhappy people, because clarity is just about the last thing to expect in any part of life touched by humans, and that includes the Church.

What’s with the personality generalizations on this thread? Seriously, do people have that little imagination?

I remember when I was introduced to the Myers-Briggs system of personality classification. I was in a big group of people and we took the test. We were put into small groups of people similar to us, according to the scores, and asked something like what makes good communication.

Each person in my group and I agreed (we were also in very similar fields). We assumed that the other groups would have responses similar to ours, but we were so wrong! Answers ranged from accurate use of words to good relationships to open body language.

It is natural that we have people who are wildly different, and it’s ok: God made people to differ. All those different ways of being allow a greater diversity of (name removed by moderator)ut into the many issues which exist in the world. How could we have artists and engineers, judges and psychologists, historians and inventors, if we didn’t have a wildly broad range of characters?

So in this area at hand: some things actually are black and white, others not so much. Wise people know with one is at hand.

Certain actions fall into certain categories, not because of the feelings of the person(s) involved, but because of something about the action itself. Feeling bad about something doesn’t make it right or wrong, some celebrate having successfully made a touchdown and some that they succeeded in committing a bank robbery-- but the nature of each act remains the same; one is good, the other is bad.

I remember arguing with someone on another forum who was proposing that the solution to “messy” Catholicism was a smaller and purer Church as once mused by the Holy Father Emeritus.

I fear that if we attempted to have a smaller, purer Church, the end result would be a small messy Church instead of a large one, and I don’t think that would serve anyone’s salvation and moreover it would just end up being a private club. Human nature is such that we usually manage to make a mess in large groups, or small; “là où il y a l’homme, il y a l’hommerie”.

Fortunately the Holy Father seems to not mind “large and messy”, to try to get as many people as possible, onto the Gospel message, no matter where they are in life.

I have the feeling that the two popes were saying different things and that you are contrasting them as if they were opposed to each other. I don’t think Pope Benedict wanted to Church to contract due to a departure of sinners, and I don’t think Pope Francis sees a Chirch-full of people sitting beside the path to holiness as the ideal.

Pope Benedict foresaw that the Church would become small as more people deserted Christ for the world, which was happening at the time he wrote that 1969.

Pope Francis wants to share the Good News so as to help those who have been-there, done-that in the world will have a place of hope to go to.

 

[OraLabora]

I’ll put forth a kind of situation I think is about as complex and difficult as it gets:

A baby boy is baptized Catholic in infancy but not raised in the faith. He contracts a civil marriage with a divorced, non-Catholic and has a few children. As far as he’s concerned, everything in his pagan life is great. Ten years into the union, he has an awakening to his Catholic faith and wants to begin practicing it, including regularizing his marital state: he realizes that the Church does not consider him to be married and so he is not to act as a married man.

The other Party thinks all of this is ridiculous and has no intention whatsoever to become Catholic or even abide by the teaching of the Church. She thinks that the man has no right to impose any restriction on her exercise of her own rights as a wife. Acrimony ensues. The man then tells his priest that the woman will take the kids and leave if he “keeps going on like this.”

Dan

Thanks this is helpful in understanding how messy things can get and is the kind of situation I had in mind.

I think it’s also important to keep in mind that in simpler times, Catholics (and for that matter people of other faiths) tended to stick together more, both geographically and socially, not stray from the faith as much, intermarriage was infrequent and much of life revolved around the parish. Plus divorce was taboo and not as readily available even legally, and it wan’t “no fault”. As we mix more with other faiths, races and peoples both globally and locally, situations that the Church could not foresee 50 or 100 years ago continue to become more common. It’s legitimate for the Church to ask herself "how do we cope with these situations and bring these people to God and His Church?

 

[Ender]

Life is filled with vagueness and generalities, and this thread has over 800 posts full of them. Every divorced and remarried person has his or her own story of how they came to be in that place. Each one of them is an example.

This is precisely the problem. So long as the discussion is vague and imprecise, the position can be maintained that communion is possible. It is only when specific cases are discussed that it becomes plain that communion is in fact not possible unless some particular doctrine is ignored.

This is a challenge to everyone who believes it is possible in theory for the divorced and remarried to receive communion under any circumstance at all (other than continence): make up such an example. If you can invent such a situation then you have basically won the argument. Either the doctrines of today (well, of yesterday at least) are still in force or there is some way around them that is not obvious to those of us who believe what the church taught up until a week or so ago.

Ender

 

[Ender]

I’ll put forth a kind of situation I think is about as complex and difficult as it gets:

A baby boy is baptized Catholic in infancy but not raised in the faith. He contracts a civil marriage with a divorced, non-Catholic and has a few children. As far as he’s concerned, everything in his pagan life is great. Ten years into the union, he has an awakening to his Catholic faith and wants to begin practicing it, including regularizing his marital state: he realizes that the Church does not consider him to be married and so he is not to act as a married man.

The other Party thinks all of this is ridiculous and has no intention whatsoever to become Catholic or even abide by the teaching of the Church. She thinks that the man has no right to impose any restriction on her exercise of her own rights as a wife. Acrimony ensues. The man then tells his priest that the woman will take the kids and leave if he “keeps going on like this.”

Dan

Thank you for doing this. I think that dealing with specific situations is the only way to clearly understand what is truly involved.

I’ll start by acknowledging this is a very difficult situation, but it is not necessarily a complicated one. The church considers his wife’s first marriage valid until it is specifically declared invalid. Given that she is essentially still married to her first husband, he is in an adulterous relationship. The choice that faces him is as clear as it is dreadful: he either continues to sin in having relations with his wife or his relationship with the woman and his children is terminated.

As I said, it is a horrible situation, but the choice is rather plain: continue to sin or lose your family. Where in church teaching is it allowed for us to do evil that good may come of it? In fact this is expressly forbidden.

Ender

 

[St_Francis]

I’ll put forth a kind of situation I think is about as complex and difficult as it gets:

A baby boy is baptized Catholic in infancy but not raised in the faith. He contracts a civil marriage with a divorced, non-Catholic and has a few children. As far as he’s concerned, everything in his pagan life is great. Ten years into the union, he has an awakening to his Catholic faith and wants to begin practicing it, including regularizing his marital state: he realizes that the Church does not consider him to be married and so he is not to act as a married man.

The other Party thinks all of this is ridiculous and has no intention whatsoever to become Catholic or even abide by the teaching of the Church. She thinks that the man has no right to impose any restriction on her exercise of her own rights as a wife. Acrimony ensues. The man then tells his priest that the woman will take the kids and leave if he “keeps going on like this.”

Dan

There are people in the Church whose spouses threatened the same if they returned or received into the Church.

There are people whose conversion causes threats to their jobs or even livelihoods, as when Protestant ministers come to consider converting to Catholicism.

And there are any number of people who were threatened with death and even killed if they persisted in the Faith.

Christ said He came to being not peace but a sword. Sometimes people need to give up something very important for something even more important.

 

[St_Francis]

In exceptional circumstances, not as a general rule.

So what did the Pope delineate as exceptional circumstances under which this could occur?

 

[OraLabora]

So what did the Pope delineate as exceptional circumstances under which this could occur?

Did you read the document?

1. If we consider the immense variety of concrete situations such as those I have mentioned, it is understandable that neither the Synod nor this Exhortation could be expected to provide a new set of general rules, canonical in nature and applicable to all cases…

1. …It is true that general rules set forth a good which can never be disregarded or neglected, but in their formulation they cannot provide absolutely for all particular situations. At the same time, it must be said that, precisely for that reason, what is part of a practical discernment in particular circumstances cannot be elevated to the level of a rule…

 

[St_Francis]

Did you read the document?

That is beside the point–I am not discussing the document. You are using the document as evidence for your point of view; you claim the document backs up your point of view; you claim the the document presents your suggestion as something that will occur rarely. I merely asked for the information you saw in the document which would define and would delineate the use of the IFS so as to restrict it to “extraordinary” cases.

Apparently that was not done so I remain in my agnostism that this document intends the change you suggest it does.

 

[OraLabora]

That is beside the point–I am not discussing the document. You are using the document as evidence for your point of view; you claim the document backs up your point of view; you claim the the document presents your suggestion as something that will occur rarely. I merely asked for the information you saw in the document which would define and would delineate the use of the IFS so as to restrict it to “extraordinary” cases.

Footnote 351 clearly states “in certain cases”. I suppose you’d prefer it if he had said “in certain rare cases”? I don’t think it was the Holy Father’s intention that he allow himself to be boxed in, in the manner you are suggesting. It was his choice and thus something we need to live with.

Will the cases be rarer with some pastors than with others? Perhaps. But that is nothing unusual. It’s always been the case that some priests were known to be lions in the confessional, and others lambs. And this goes well before Vatican II, if my my mother’s tales were anything to go on.

I think it is clear enough to say though that he didn’t intend for this to apply to everyone.

And I think it is pointless to ask for specifics when he said himself in his exhortation that the situations are so infinitely variable, one cannot pin down a set of specific rules or cases. Moreover I think it is understandable that he did not give specific examples, for fear of boxing in his pastors when unexpected and unusual cases arise.

Frankly I don’t see the angst over all this

 

[TMC]

This is precisely the problem. So long as the discussion is vague and imprecise, the position can be maintained that communion is possible. It is only when specific cases are discussed that it becomes plain that communion is in fact not possible unless some particular doctrine is ignored.

This is a challenge to everyone who believes it is possible in theory for the divorced and remarried to receive communion under any circumstance at all (other than continence): make up such an example. If you can invent such a situation then you have basically won the argument. Either the doctrines of today (well, of yesterday at least) are still in force or there is some way around them that is not obvious to those of us who believe what the church taught up until a week or so ago.

Ender

If your goal is try to prevent as many people as possible from gaining access to the sacraments, I suppose you might be right. But if the goal is to meet people where they are and help them, I don’t see how you can avoid dealing with the messy details of each individual situation. I think the latter is the Church’s goal, and has been for a lot longer than a week.

 

[Ender]

If your goal is try to prevent as many people as possible from gaining access to the sacraments, I suppose you might be right. But if the goal is to meet people where they are and help them, I don’t see how you can avoid dealing with the messy details of each individual situation. I think the latter is the Church’s goal, and has been for a lot longer than a week.

My objective is nothing other than to get into those messy details and examine them. I’m trying to get you and everyone else to put aside the vague generalities and invent whatever situation you can imagine that would allow someone who could not receive in the past to properly receive today. The point is, if you cannot imagine such a specific situation how can you assert that such a situation can exist?

Ender

 

[St_Francis]

Footnote 351 clearly states “in certain cases”. I suppose you’d prefer it if he had said “in certain rare cases”? I don’t think it was the Holy Father’s intention that he allow himself to be boxed in, in the manner you are suggesting. It was his choice and thus something we need to live with.

I have no preferences because I am not discussing AL. I see how his words could be interpreted in the direction you propose, but I do not see that the prohibition against the IFS is being proposed. It could easily be that he has an idea in mind (altho the news reported that he had forgotten the footnote), that something was badly edited, that he was referring to guiding those in irregular situations to an appreciation of the sacraments which would convince them to strive for continence,…

I do not know what his intention is, so I can’t discuss it. You brought it in to defend your advocacy of the IFS; it does not provide what would be necessary, which is an explanation of how the IFS could be legitimately used.

Will the cases be rarer with some pastors than with others? Perhaps. But that is nothing unusual. It’s always been the case that some priests were known to be lions in the confessional, and others lambs. And this goes well before Vatican II, if my my mother’s tales were anything to go on.

One of the great dangers is that should a couple be instructed incorrectly and thus sin, the guilt of the sin will fall upon the one who instructed them. This endangers not only those in irregular situations but those who guide them in this direction.

I think it is clear enough to say though that he didn’t intend for this to apply to everyone.

On its face, it seems clear. The call to read this, as any Church document, in light of Church teaching, is where confusion enters. This is why I remain in ignorance of what the Pope actually intended.

And I think it is pointless to ask for specifics when he said himself in his exhortation that the situations are so infinitely variable, one cannot pin down a set of specific rules or cases. Moreover I think it is understandable that he did not give specific examples, for fear of boxing in his pastors when unexpected and unusual cases arise.

It is difficult to follow instructions which are not defined.

Frankly I don’t see the angst over all this

You do not have a problem with desecrating the Body and Blood of our Lord? You do not see a problem with people spending eternity in Hell?

 

[Tomdstone]

Christ said He came to being not peace but a sword.

I personally am for peace. I am against war and the use of the sword to chop off people’s heads. I think that every measure must be taken to promote peace. If you are claiming that Christianity is to use the sword to solve problems, then I would not support it. I am in favor of peaceful non-violent methods to resolve disputes.

 

[OraLabora]

You do not have a problem with desecrating the Body and Blood of our Lord? You do not see a problem with people spending eternity in Hell?

Stop this silly game of trying to put words in my mouth. I’m not interested in these sorts of debating games.