Replies

I WANT to have compassion for sinners, as I am guilty too often myself. All it takes to receive the Eucharist is repentance and a promise to change, with His help. The Devil’s pride prevented his repentance, hence his hell. Same is the option for all of us.

What stops us? Not the Church. Our unwillingness to struggle for an eternity with Christ.

The Church has Tribunals to determine the invalidity of separated marriages, already. This “Communion for the remarried divorcee” question is for those who couldn’t convince the Tribunal. But not all divorcees, only the remarried, the ones that went and remarried anyway, in daily contradiction to the Church and her Commandment on Adultery.

They want to continue the adultery but make it no longer a mortal sin, so they can receive not only Him in the Eucharist now, but to no longer have this mortal sin adding onto their soul daily and into eternity when they see Him later.

Much like homosexual marriage - to be able to receive Christ in the Eucharist now, in spite of current unrepented likewise “formally promised” mortal sin, and to be spiritually free to continue the mortally grave activity, unto eternity .

Anybody else want their pet mortal sin negated into eternity because the Cross is too hard and may offend your lover and new children?

That’s the pre-death purgatorial Cross - this is what remains when mortal sin evaporates after repentance and His Mercy. The emotional and physical cross of this earth. You’re still known as a murderer, though God forgives you. You still suffer time in jail, though God forgives you. Your past life as a married person or twice married person or prostitute or embezzler or stalker or thief still hounds you, but Jesus forgave you and loves you dearly in your up and down daily striving for sainthood. Pick up your Cross, join tit to Jesus, and walk people, that’s what being a good Christian is all about. Seeking Cross-less-ness is the sin that got us this particular Cross of ours in the first place!

The Eucharist isn’t what these folks need, they need the belief, then action. First action - repentance. Second, carry that Cross. Third - reception of the Eucharist. And our deep support in that new and high dignity they seek for themselves and the Eucharist.

“Were the decisions that followed Henry VIII’s divorce totally unnecessary?”

Those decisions made by him in his Church of England? He was a heretic at that point.

Furthermore, it is said of Henry VIII that in his heart he always was and remained a Catholic. He just wanted things his own way.

So his teachings bent the rules to do it.

The newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity about the rapidity with which hundreds or thousands of human families are being broken up by the lawyers; and about the undisguised haste of the “hustling judges” who carry on the work. It is a form of hilarity which would seem to recall the gaiety of a grave-digger in a city swept by a pestilence. But a few details occasionally flash by in the happy dance; from time to time the court is moved by a momentary curiosity about the causes of the general violation of oaths and promises; as if there might, here and there, be a hint of some sort of reason for ruining the fundamental institution of society. And nobody who notes those details, or considers those faint hints of reason, can doubt for a moment that masses of these men and women are now simply using divorce in the spirit of free-love. They are very seldom the sort of people who have once fallen tragically into the wrong place, and have now found their way triumphantly to the right place. They are almost always people who are obviously wandering from one place to another, and will probably leave their last shelter exactly as they have left their first. But it seems to amuse them to make again, if possible in a church, a promise they have already broken in practice and almost avowedly disbelieve in principle.

– The Superstition of Divorce (1920).