Posted on 04/21/2016 12:07:54 PM PDT by ebb tide
Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, has begun to change attitudes to Communion in the archdiocese of Milan, according to a senior official.
In an article for the Milan archdiocese website, Monsignor Fausto Gilardi, who is in charge of Confession at Milan Cathedral, says that there has been a growing “demand” in the diocese from the divorced and remarried for absolution and Communion.
Mgr Gilardi’s piece, which has been translated for the news website Crux, claims that some priests have changed their practice. He says that some have “opened a ‘teller’s window’ for consultations”.
Mgr Gilardi comments that this seems to contradict Amoris Laetitia’s warning against “the grave danger of misunderstandings, such as the notion that any priest can quickly grant ‘exceptions’”.
The article says that other priests have asked divorced and remarried people to enter a pastoral process, but he does not specify whether Communion is a possible goal.
Mgr Gilardi writes that in the last few days, the divorced and remarried have mostly not been “disappointed” by the invitation to a “journey”.
He also says that pastors “aren’t called to impose a norm, but to lift up the value expressed through that norm’”.
Since its publication, Pope Francis’s encyclical has generated differing interpretations. Much of the debate was over footnote 351, which some argued implied that the Pope wanted the Eucharist to be a possibility for divorced and remarried couples.
Last week, however, Pope Francis said that he couldn’t remember writing the footnote.
Recent major statements on the subject, by Pope St John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had reaffirmed the Church’s traditional practice, which is that the divorced and remarried are not to take Communion unless they live “in complete continence”.
At the press conference following the publication of Amoris Laetitia, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn said that he didn’t “see why there should be a change” from John Paul II’s approach.
Ping
Of course.
My question is, What about the second divorce/third marriage? Are we to withhold mercy and grace to those in third, fourth, fifth, sixth marriages? Or is the “journey” the same for multiple “irregularities?”
Divorced and remarried people have been asking for years, and are usually told “yes”.
Well, on the plane ride back from his Rio World Yute Day, Francis offered the example of the schismatic Orthodox and their limit of only three valid marriages per individual.
There’s no way you could possibly know that.
So mercy and grace run out after three? Such small minded rules!
I don’t know. Francis has already proved he’s more merciful that God.
“Francis has already proved he’s more merciful that God.”
I get your point, but have to say that no one is even close to being as merciful as God. Only God can measure what’s in your heart.
But God is also perfectly just. Not Francis, not by a long shot.
How do you define Just? Neither you or I can define it, and divine ‘justice’ is way beyond our comprehension as human beings.
Maybe it’s beyond your comprehension. But I can’t help you there.
That ain’t Catholic teaching. The pope-a-dope doesn’t seem to know much about Catholic doctrine.
If your understanding, estimation, love, and respect for God is so small that you think you know entirely what God thinks, and that the grandeur of an entity that can create our lives, and a universe (and likely multiple parallel universes) so grand and expansive that we are less than specks in comparison is something that we can distill down into a few ‘rules’, then I truly feel sorry for you.
I never said any such thing. I’m just surprised that you don’t know what the word, “just”, means.
So there could be a parallel "you"? How will I know whom I'm speaking with?
A limit of three is cruel and harsh.
:)
Look, I know you are driven by your spirituality, and you have no idea how deeply I respect that - especially in our world as it is today. I am also driven by mine, and I’m trying my best to do my best. In the context of all that you and I, and so many others, are fighting for, lets not needlessly be fighting each other. I think we are generally on the same page.
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