Two more cardinals back Communion for divorced and remarried

[Sy_Noe]

That’s the whole point. She should be excused (for lack of a better word) from her first marriage because of her philandering husband. She’s being punished for the rest of her life for something she did not do.

I agree. And just to note the poll just now for the first time went to a majority would accept.

 

[PRmerger]

My argument is merely that when the professed faithful differ, it gives the appearance of even more cafeteria Catholics.

Well, that’s stating the obvious, isn’t it?

And, as such, who would argue with that?

 

[PRmerger]

She committed adultery, and jesus did say divorce is alliwed in those cases.

No. That is a mistranslation.

Otherwise, that would give anyone who wishes to divorce his wife permission to cheat on her…then he can say, well, Jesus said that if I commit adultery then I get to divorce you!’"

I havent been to mass for a few months now.

That is a great shame. There are many who leave because of the “hard sayings”.

But, alas, we cannot create a god who conforms to the creature. We, the creature, must conform to the Creator.

Even when He proclaims “hard sayings.”

 

[PRmerger]

The catholic church is the only church that has these rules,

Right.

It is the only Church which has not usurped the power of God and taken upon itself the right to edit His message to make it more palatable.

its ridiculous to expect someone who has divorced because their spouse committed adultery to never marry again.

That is creating a god that conforms to your own image, rather than conforming your image to God’s.

 

[Sy_Noe]

That is the problem with sin. It can affect others, innocent others. So she cannot be remarried again. Yes that is hard. But when someone murders someone and denies them the ability to go to confession first, that too can be a problem. When some sick person tortures someone then maybe, perhaps there are lasting effects. When a woman is raped and conceives a child, she has affects from the sin. It alters her life. The Church is not a magic wand that is waved to make bad things and the effects of one’s sin go away. It never has claimed that power.

I guess you’re serious when you compare an innocent wife whose husband went out and cheated on her with murder and rape and think she should be punished for his adultery.

 

[PRmerger]

I guess you’re serious when you compare an innocent wife whose husband went out and cheated on her with murder and rape and think she should be punished for his adultery.

Try to think more in the abstract, Sy. No one ought to be saying that an innocent wife re-marrying after adultery is the same as murder and rape.

They are alike only in the fact that they are all grave sins. But they are not the same.

 

[TEPO]

Right.

It is the only Church which has not usurped the power of God and taken upon itself the right to edit His message to make it more palatable.

That is creating a god that conforms to your own image, rather than conforming your image to God’s.

But God is known to allow marriage to be more palatable depending on the time and reason. God allowed multiple wives for a time during the mosaic period.

There is no big t in this tradition. It’s not forever.

 

[Sy_Noe]

I spoke too soon. The poll is now tied as of this second. Seems to be going back and forth for right now.

 

[PRmerger]

But God is known to allow marriage to be more palatable depending on the time and reason. God allowed multiple wives for a time during the mosaic period.

I think it’s a mistake, friend, to read what was *recorded *in the Scriptures as what God endorsed.

For example, God allowed David to lust after Bathsheba.

One ought not interpret this to mean: God endorses lust.

There is no big t in this tradition. It’s not forever.

That’s above your paygrade to determine if it’s "forever’ or not.

 

[TEPO]

I think it’s a mistake, friend, to read what was *recorded *in the Scriptures as what God endorsed.

For example, God allowed David to lust after Bathsheba.

One ought not interpret this to mean: God endorses lust.

That’s above your paygrade to determine if it’s "forever’ or not.

The official catholic position, from what I understand, is that God allowed it to increase reproduction of the Jews, as well as allowing them a sort of indulgence of some kind because of their lustfulness.

…today, catholicity among Catholics is on the decline again. Maybe we need another favor for the sake of souls.

 

[PRmerger]

The official catholic position, from what I understand, is that God allowed it to increase reproduction.

No, TEPO. This is not correct.

Unless you can cite a source, an “official” source, that limns this as the Catholic position?

God allowed lots of immoral acts in the OT. Why, He still allows them today.

But it’s a mistake to interpret this as actual “permission” to sin. It is not an endorsement by God just because human beings engage in it, and it is recorded in Scripture.

 

[Sy_Noe]

I think it’s a mistake, friend, to read what was *recorded *in the Scriptures as what God endorsed.

For example, God allowed David to lust after Bathsheba.

One ought not interpret this to mean: God endorses lust.

That’s above your paygrade to determine if it’s "forever’ or not.

So in your view it was wrong for the Bereans to search Scripture to see what was true?

 

[TEPO]

No, TEPO. This is not correct.

Unless you can cite a source, an “official” source, that limns this as the Catholic position?

God allowed lots of immoral acts in the OT. Why, He still allows them today.

But it’s a mistake to interpret this as actual “permission” to sin. It is not an endorsement by God just because human beings engage in it, and it is recorded in Scripture.

I’ll try to dig it up again. I’ll see if I can find it.

 

[Sy_Noe]

The official catholic position, from what I understand, is that God allowed it to increase reproduction of the Jews, as well as allowing them a sort of indulgence of some kind because of their lustfulness.

…today, catholicity among Catholics is on the decline again. Maybe we need another favor for the sake of souls.

The Holy Father does keep talking about God’s surprises.

 

[Brandall]

I agree. And just to note the poll just now for the first time went to a majority would accept.

You’ve been noting the poll since there were all of 20 total votes recorded. Even with 48 total votes recorded, it’s insignificant. However, it that entertains you…

 

[PRmerger]

So in your view it was wrong for the Bereans to search Scripture to see what was true?

LOL!

You go from “PRmerger says that not everything that happens in the Bible is endorsed by God”…

to “Therefore, NOTHING that happens in the Bible is endorsed by God!”

Really?

 

[FollowChrist34]

I am posting this article in its entirety in two posts - it is DEFINITELY worth reading.

The Pope and the Precipice - This month’s synod sparked debate about how far Pope Francis will push church teachings.
Ross Douthat - New York Times - Oct 25, 2014

To grasp why events this month in Rome — publicly feuding cardinals, documents floated and then disavowed — were so remarkable in the context of modern Catholic history, it helps to understand certain practical aspects of the doctrine of papal infallibility.

On paper, the doctrine of papal infallibility seems to grant extraordinary power to the pope — since he cannot err, the First Vatican Council declared in 1870, when he “defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.”

In practice, though, it places profound effective limits on his power.

Those limits are set, in part, by normal human modesty: “I am only infallible if I speak infallibly, but I shall never do that,” John XXIII is reported to have said. But they’re also set by the binding power of existing teaching, which a pope cannot reverse or contradict without proving his own office, well, fallible — effectively dynamiting the very claim to authority on which his decisions rest.

But something very different is happening under Pope Francis. In his public words and gestures, through the men he’s elevated and the debates he’s encouraged, this pope has repeatedly signaled a desire to rethink issues where Catholic teaching is in clear tension with Western social life — sex and marriage, divorce and homosexuality.

And in the synod on the family, which concluded a week ago in Rome, the prelates in charge of the proceedings — men handpicked by the pontiff — formally proposed such a rethinking, issuing a document that suggested both a general shift in the church’s attitude toward nonmarital relationships and a specific change, admitting the divorced-and-remarried to communion, that conflicts sharply with the church’s historic teaching on marriage’s indissolubility.

At which point there was a kind of chaos. Reports from inside the synod have a medieval feel — churchmen berating each other, accusations of manipulation flying, rebellions bubbling up. Outside Catholicism’s doors, the fault lines were laid bare: geographical (Germans versus Africans; Poles versus Italians), generational (a 1970s generation that seeks cultural accommodation and a younger, John Paul II-era that seeks to be countercultural) and theological above all.

In the end, the document’s controversial passages were substantially walked back. But even then, instead of a Vatican II-style consensus, the synod divided, with large numbers voting against even watered-down language around divorce and homosexuality. Some of those votes may have been cast by disappointed progressives. But many others were votes cast, in effect, against the pope.

In the week since, many Catholics have downplayed the starkness of what happened or minimized the papal role. Conservatives have implied that the synod organizers somehow went rogue, that Pope Francis’s own views were not really on the table, that orthodox believers should not be worried. More liberal Catholics have argued that there was no real chaos — this was just the kind of freewheeling, Jesuit-style debate Francis was hoping for — and that the pope certainly suffered no meaningful defeat.

Neither argument is persuasive. Yes, Francis has taken no formal position on the issues currently in play. But all his moves point in a pro-change direction — and it simply defies belief that men appointed by the pope would have proposed departures on controversial issues without a sense that Francis would approve.

If this is so, the synod has to be interpreted as a rebuke of the implied papal position. The pope wishes to take these steps, the synod managers suggested. Given what the church has always taught, many of the synod’s participants replied, he and we cannot.

Over all, that conservative reply has the better of the argument. Not necessarily on every issue: The church’s attitude toward gay Catholics, for instance, has often been far more punitive and hostile than the pastoral approach to heterosexuals living in what the church considers sinful situations, and there are clearly ways that the church can be more understanding of the cross carried by gay Christians.

But going beyond such a welcome to a kind of celebration of the virtues of nonmarital relationships generally, as the synod document seemed to do, might open a divide between formal teaching and real-world practice that’s too wide to be sustained. And on communion for the remarried, the stakes are not debatable at all. The Catholic Church was willing to lose the kingdom of England, and by extension the entire English-speaking world, over the principle that when a first marriage is valid a second is adulterous, a position rooted in the specific words of Jesus of Nazareth. To change on that issue, no matter how it was couched, would not be development; it would be contradiction and reversal.

SUCH a reversal would put the church on the brink of a precipice. Of course it would be welcomed by some progressive Catholics and hailed by the secular press. But it would leave many of the church’s bishops and theologians in an untenable position, and it would sow confusion among the church’s orthodox adherents — encouraging doubt and defections, apocalypticism and paranoia (remember there is another pope still living!) and eventually even a real schism.

 

[FollowChrist34]

Part II of II. The Pope and the Precipice - This month’s synod sparked debate about how far Pope Francis will push church teachings.
Ross Douthat - New York Times - Oct 25, 2014

Those adherents are, yes, a minority — sometimes a small minority — among self-identified Catholics in the West. But they are the people who have done the most to keep the church vital in an age of institutional decline: who have given their energy and time and money in an era when the church is stained by scandal, who have struggled to raise families and live up to demanding teachings, who have joined the priesthood and religious life in an age when those vocations are not honored as they once were. They have kept the faith amid moral betrayals by their leaders; they do not deserve a theological betrayal.

Which is why this pope has incentives to step back from the brink — as his closing remarks to the synod, which aimed for a middle way between the church’s factions, were perhaps designed to do.

Francis is charismatic, popular, widely beloved. He has, until this point, faced strong criticism only from the church’s traditionalist fringe, and managed to unite most Catholics in admiration for his ministry. There are ways that he can shape the church without calling doctrine into question, and avenues he can explore (annulment reform, in particular) that would bring more people back to the sacraments without a crisis. He can be, as he clearly wishes to be, a progressive pope, a pope of social justice — and he does not have to break the church to do it.

But if he seems to be choosing the more dangerous path — if he moves to reassign potential critics in the hierarchy, if he seems to be stacking the next synod’s ranks with supporters of a sweeping change — then conservative Catholics will need a cleareyed understanding of the situation.

They can certainly persist in the belief that God protects the church from self-contradiction. But they might want to consider the possibility that they have a role to play, and that this pope may be preserved from error only if the church itself resists him.

 

[Sy_Noe]

You’ve been noting the poll since there were all of 20 total votes recorded. Even with 48 total votes recorded, it’s insignificant. However, it that entertains you…

I just find the poll interesting since it reflects the thread topic. But granted I don’t know whose voting how. Whether for instance faithful Catholics are voting they would agree if the Pope implements changes which result in more being allowed to receive. Or if they are saying they would disagree and choose not to agree with the Pope. I do only know how I voted.

 

[Sy_Noe]

LOL!

You go from “PRmerger says that not everything that happens in the Bible is endorsed by God”…

to “Therefore, NOTHING that happens in the Bible is endorsed by God!”

Really?

Well you sometimes confuse me because you talk about above paygrade so I didn’t know if it was above the Bereans paygrade to search to see what’s true? I’ll take it no that it wasn’t.