On January 29th, Pope Benedict spoke to the members of the Roman Rota, the church panel with the highest authority in marriage law cases. Although I sympathize with some of his claims that the Church should attempt to aid couples in salvaging legitimate marriages, I think he goes too far in stating: "In the church, the aim of judicial activity is the salvation of souls." If a man or woman is in what the Church considers a legitimate marriage, falls in love with someone else, divorces their original spouse and marries the other person, am I too assume they are probably going to hell because they cannot get an annulment. Or worse yet, let's say that the Church allows the remarried person to receive communion, are they going to hell?I can think of some extreme cases where I might say yes, but overall, I think not. Is divorce a grave evil that plagues are society... yes. Is preventing the remarried from receiving communion saving marriages and souls... no, not the last time I checked. This is an issue that the Vatican needs to seriously address with an eye for actually saving souls, by bringing people back to the Church.
A Faithful Catholic
5 comments:
There is no such thing as a faithful liberal Catholic.
I think there is certainly some abuse of annulments and the Church needs to be careful in evaluating the legitimacy of the marriage. We do not want Annulment to be seen and become Catholic "divorce".
As for a divorced Catholic who remarries and receives communion, I'm not willing to say they are going to hell. I think there are legitimate pastoral concerns that would need to be evaluated, but in addition, that Catholic would have to know he could not receive. I would imagine that the vast majority of Catholics are not aware of that, the poor Catechesis of the last decades makes it highly likely.
Adultery is the grave evil.
Dad, I understand. But I bet if you polled the average Catholic in the pew, they don't realize they need an annulment. My point was that they cannot necessarily be held to account (certainly not by us) for poor Catechisis. Rather we need to hold the poor Catechists to account.
The Catholic Church does, in fact, make its annulment process functionally the same as divorce.
I formally defected from the Catholic Church in the wake of its nearly complete acceptance of my wife and her adulterous partner.
This has made my faithfulness to our vows a joke.
Since I have not been able to get the Catholic Church to formally excommunicate me, I took the action to remove myself, as best I understood it, from the Catholic Church.
If the Pope had the guts and the integrity to stop listening to his idiot bishops and priests and start talking to those of us who have seen our marriage destroyed by the clergy and the laity, he might learn something.
Until he realizes that business as usual is not ok anymore, the Catholic Church will remain filled with lousy priests and lousy laymen. I am not talking about those who STRUGGLE with their sins. I am talking about those committed to gutting the truth from the Catholic Church.
I have little respect for this Pope and I see no real changes coming.
For me there is nowhere to go. Either God will save my soul, outside the shell of Catholicism that Benedict and his ilk prefer, or I will spend eternity separated from God. It is that simple and that tragic.
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