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Cupich: In AL Francis exercises the "divinely granted Petrine power of loosening and binding" Cardinal Cupich has written the forward to a new English translation of Cardinal Coccopalmerio's booklet "A Commentary on Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia", previously published here on Rorate in full in April.  In his endorsement of Coccopalmerio's book-long defense of adultery for the divorced and civilly remarried, Cupich cites an article by Rocco Buttiglione calling Amoris Laetitia a "development of doctrine and what it means for Popes to exercise their divinely granted Petrine power of loosening and binding in different ways and in different historical circumstances."  Cupich suggests...

Belgian Bishops: Divorced & Civilly Remarried May Receive Holy Communion Bradley Eli, M.Div., Ma.Th.  •  ChurchMilitant.com  •  May 30, 2017    54 CommentsGuidelines allow divorced and sexually active laity to follow their own conscience BRUSSELS, Belgium (ChurchMilitant.com) - The bishops of Belgium are saying that divorced Catholics, who are sexually active, may follow their conscience to the Communion rail. On May 24, the Belgian bishops published a pastoral letter in Dutch and French, giving an interpretion of the papal exhortation Amoris Laetitia (AL) that allows divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to decide for themselves whether they should receive the sacraments. The...

Yesterday, 25 May, the Catholic channel EWTN aired an interview of Raymond Arroyo’s The World Over which was conducted a week ago with Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). In this interview – which was conducted in English – the German cardinal touches upon several important matters which are of interest to the larger Catholic world. When Raymond Arroyo asks Cardinal Müller about the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia and the confusion stemming from it, the cardinal first states: “It is absolutely impossible that the pope, as the successor of St. Peter,...

Too many Catholics are caught up in a “comfortable” Catholicism that makes them unwilling, and even unable, to see the “grave problems” currently besetting the Church, said a renowned theologian and one of the world’s top Catholic experts on the Church Fathers. “Most Catholics seem to live their life on a sort of comfortable zone, just the way that a lot of bishops live in a sort of safety-first sort of zone,” Australian patristics and classics scholar Anna Silvas said. “It is too disturbing” for those living in such a zone to “pry any more deeply,” because what they might...

Yesterday Perugia Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti came in first in the vote of the Italian Bishops that proposed a new president of the Bishops' Conference to Pope Francis. Today, Pope Francis named him who was his candidate of choice. Bassetti is a weak figure, who is beyond the retirement age of 75.His nomination will not challenge the true strongman of the Conference, Monsignor Nunzio Galantino, whom Pope Francis imposed in December 2013 as the Secretary-General of the Conference making clear that through this move he wanted to sideline the then president, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco whom he de facto deemed too Catholic.Galantino...

Cardinal Caffarra: “We are no longer witnesses, but deserters, if we do not speak openly and publicly” May 20, 2017 87Share This address was given by His Eminence Carlo Cardinal Caffarra on 19 May 2017 at the fourth annual Rome Life Forum, which is organised by Voice of the Family.“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” [John 12, 32]. “The whole world is under the power of the Evil One” [1 John, 5, 19].Reading these divine words gives us perfect awareness of what is really happening in the world, within the human...

A woman who was driving in Pathum Thani, Thailand and spotted her husband driving in another car with his alleged mistress gave chase and damaged several vehicles and injured several others in the process. The woman was driving in a black Toyota Fortuner while her husband drove a white Mercedes Benz. The news made headlines in Thailand with many social media users either sympathising with her plight or criticising her for her selfish actions. According to news reports, the woman had secretly planted a GPS tracker in her husband’s vehicle. She had not only caused heavy traffic in northern Bangkok...

Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga loses it In his new interview book Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga loses his temper when lashing out on Cardinal Raymond Burke because he stated that the controversial document Amoris Laetitia is not part of the Magisterium. Rodríguez insults his confrere as a "disappointed man because he wanted power and lost it." He insinuates that "[Cardinal Burke] thought he was the highest authority in the United States." Then he adds: "As Saint Therese of Lisieux said, 'I prefer to be small because if I happen to stumble, to fall, then the hit will not be so big; but those...

Pius XII's Condemnation of Situation Ethics: "Accusations of rigidity first attack the adorable person of Christ" "Taking, therefore, the words of Christ and of the Apostle [Paul] as the strict rule, should not one say that the Church of today is rather inclined more to coddling than to severity? It so happens that the accusation of oppressive rigidity made against the Church by the ‘new morality,’ in reality, attacks, in the first place, the adorable Person of Christ Himself." These words, uttered 65 years ago in 1952 by Pope Ven. Pius XII against so-called 'situation ethics' ring true today now...

Vatican Insider has published a report concerning the postscript to a volume on Amoris Laetitia entitled “Amoris Laetitia: a turning point in moral theology?” The title is a dead giveaway to the book’s thesis: that the current occupant of the Chair of Peter, by the mere publication of an apostolic exhortation, has altered the Church’s constant moral teaching in some dramatic way — as if any Pope had such authority. The postscript on which the article reports demonstrates how this imaginary “turning point” is to be defended: sophistry that borders on the clownish, to which a reasonable response would be:...

A canon lawyer, employed by a U.S. diocese, taught her audience including priests, that because no directives from the bishop have been issued about Amoris Laetitia, the priests should follow Buenos Aires and Malta. In those territories, priests are free to give permission to adulterous partners to receive Holy Communion, even though the couple continues to have sex, and one (or both) of the parties is already married to someone else. This permission occurs after accompaniment and discernment by the priest. MaryÂ’s Advocates is sharing the audio recording, though the person that made the recording said the diocese must be...

The new Grand Master of the embattled Knights of Malta, Fra' Giacomo Dalla Torre, is clarifying the history and mission of the order he's been elected to lead. "The Order of Malta has a history of almost a thousand years," he told L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official newspaper, in a May 4 interview. "It was born in the Holy Land as a hospitaller order and over time, even in moments of great difficulty, it has never forgotten its mission: to help the poor, the sick, the excluded, in short, anyone living in need, without distinction of origin or religion."  For us,...

LET’S BUILD ON CHRIST Interview of His Excellency Mons. Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of Karaganda (Kazakhstan) You and two other Bishops have written a letter calling to pray for the Pope related to “Amoris laetitia” exhortation in order to encourage Him to explain the doubts around it. – In these circumstances the only indispensable act of the Pope consists in unambiguously confirming the Divine truth of the indissolubility of marriage not only regarding doctrine, but also regarding the practice, as it did Jesus Christ and according to His example all of His Vicars on earth, the Roman Pontiffs. The central...

What is "implied" in the whole discourse of Pope Francis' Exhortation Amoris Laetitia is "very clear and really runs against very important dogmatic articles of the faith," said a professor of Patristics and medieval philosophy in an interview.   Professor Claudio Pierantoni of the University of Chile made the comment to Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register in an April 22 interview. Pierantoni spoke at a conference in Rome that same day on the need to clarify the confusion caused by the Pope's controversial Apostolic Exhortation.  It's "not quite the case" that Amoris Laetitia can be interpreted in an orthodox way, Pierantoni said in the...

The woman stayed in the hotel room in Halle with her companion in June 2010. She asked judges to force the hotel to fully name her lover who she knew only as Michael. The hotel had earlier refused to identify the man who was billed for the room or to supply his address. ***** Judges said the man has the right to control his own personal data, along with the right to protect his family and marriage, according to the statement. Those rights took precedence over her right to child maintenance payments, the court added.

April 28, 2017  (Steven O’Reilly) –  Since the publication of Amoris Laetitia (AL), I do not recall ever seeing an official statement by the Archdiocese of Atlanta regarding its understanding of the eighth chapter of this apostolic exhortation. To my knowledge, Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory has never issued any specific communion guidelines or statements in the wake of AL, as have some other US bishops—such as Archbishop Chaput (Philadelphia) and Bishop McElroy (San Diego) — or as have other bishops around the world have done (e.g., see Poland, Kazakhstan, Malta, Germany.   All has been quiet in Atlanta—until now.  There appear to be some...

Leaving aside the arguments about reduced culpability for a moment, I would like to post, for the record, some of my more fundamental concerns regarding the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Reading this document was, I found, not like reading anything else promulgated by the Church, and I have read a lot of Church documents! Even a perfunctory reading left me feeling uneasy with simple and obvious errors contained therein, it felt like it was a different faith! As I cited in this post, the Professor who taught me Moral Theology has pointed out some of these glaring and obvious...

The Pope and the Cardinal go together, hand in hand As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller is charged with the duty to “spread sound doctrine and defend those points of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines.” When confronted with the “new and unacceptable doctrines” enunciated in the disastrous Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, however, Müller engages in a shameless cover-up, leaving it to concerned members of the laity to defend the Church’s infallible moral teaching from AL’s blatant attack upon it. In an interview published by...

The leading Vaticanist Sandro Magister continues his indispensable role in chronicling what can only be called "the Bergoglian debacle," which has reached its nadir with the publication of Amoris Laetitia (AL). In his blog post of April 22, Magister provides a link to the integral Italian text (translations mine) of an intervention by Dr. Claudio Pierantoni, Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Chile. His was one of six addresses delivered in Rome at a conference of lay academics, the theme of which was AL's attack, in Chapter 8, on the Church's traditional teaching concerning the moral law. Pierantoni...

New Impulse? In an interview with the Portuguese paper, "Jornal de Noticias" the prelate of the Opus Dei, Bishop Fernando Ocariz, defended Holy Communion for adulterers as proposed by Amoris Laetitia. He called this - quote - "a new pastoral impulse which requires concrete answers in continuity with the doctrine of the Magisterum."