AmericanPapist Comments
LOL, Thomas! I could have ruined my keyboard reading this one. Yep, Jesus is a mean, mean man, or God, or whatever. No, wait, He was kind and merciful, but the BIG, BAD, CATHOLIC CHURCH obviously WANTS women to be subject to beatings and adultery. No wait! The really mean Catholic Church insists that men should be faithful to their wives, and wives to their husbands. Don't they understand that we have feelings? "Weep" Oh, never mind, as long as we have "feelings", we can do whatever we d***n well please. Jesus will understand--he ate with tax collectors and sinners, right? Oh, for Pete's (Peter's) sake, what was He thinking when He told people to follow the commandments (He was really mean to Peter--calling him Satan and all)??
OK, I don't really know whether to laugh or cry over this one. (You would think that Catholics would understand that Truth should be determined by a majority vote--what is PBXVI thinking???) "serious irony alert"
I would amend one statement you made, Thomas.
If one has remarried after a divorce, and has not received an annulment from their marriage, the Church presumes that they are committing fornication, which as a mortal sin, bars the communicant from receiving until they have confessed.
...and rectified the situation. The remarried person, if truly repentant for his actions, needs to live as brother and sister with his civil spouse (or move out until resolved), seek annulment, and have the civil marriage convalidated.
Matt's amendment seems correct to me, but what I really wanted to say was this: the fact that an on-line Time magazine article on Biblical teaching on divorce is being so amazingly widely read says 3=2 things: 1) people are keenly interested in knowing what Christianity has to say about fundamental issues; and 2) we in the Church need to do much more to inform people about where the real answers are to be found, cuz right now, folks think it's in Time magazine.
dunno how that 3=2 got in there. it should be "2 things" of course.
but many divorced and remarried couples nonetheless find that their conscience permits them to take Communion.
And many pedophiles find that their consciences permit them to molest children.
In a parish in which the status of the couple is known, it is up to the priest to refuse communion to those living in sin for the sake of their own immortal souls.
It's amazing the lengths we fallen humans will go to justify our sin to ourselves. Couple that with private interpretation of the Bible and the possibilities are just endless.
Revise Scripture to our "contemporary American norms"?
In On Conscience Ratzinger/Benedict quotes Bl. John Cardinal Newman: "Yes, I will toast the Pope, but not before I toast conscience." By which Newman intends the conscience that God gave us, not that subjective thinking that tends to become warped by secular society.
The Pope, God bless him, is the guardian of conscience in this capricious concupiscent world.
1) people are keenly interested in knowing what Christianity has to say about fundamental issues; and 2) we in the Church need to do much more to inform people about where the real answers are to be found, cuz right now, folks think it's in Time magazine.
I think that people just go to Time magazine, because they may find there what they want to hear and not the traditional stand that they don't "like"
great post!
KI, I don't think that's necessarily the case. While Time might not challenge people's assumptions, it confirms their false assumptions, and that in itself is a problem.
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