Posted on 11/15/2014 1:56:37 PM PST by NYer
VATICAN CITY — The secrecy of a confession is maintained so seriously and completely by the Catholic Church that a priest would be excommunicated for revealing the contents of a confession when ordered to testify by a court or even after the penitent dies, Vatican officials said.
“No confessor can be dispensed from it, even if he would want to reveal the contents of a confession in order to prevent a serious and imminent evil,” said Msgr. Krzysztof Nykiel, regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican court dealing with matters of conscience.
The penitentiary sponsored a conference at the Vatican Nov. 12-13 on “the confessional seal and pastoral privacy.”
According to the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, conference participants heard that since the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 spelled out the penalties in church law for violating the secret of the confessional, “the discipline of the church in this matter has remained substantially the same,” with the exception of additional protections.
One of those additions, the newspaper said, was a 1988 church law explicitly stating that using an “electronic apparatus” to record, broadcast or otherwise share the contents of a confession also is an excommunicable offense.
Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, told conference participants it is important “to remove any suspicion” that the church’s commitment to the confessional seal “is designed to cover intrigues, plots or mysteries as people sometimes naively believe or, more easily, are led to believe.”
The seal, he said, is intended to protect the most intimate part of the human person, “that is, to safeguard the presence of God within each man.” The effect of the secret, he said, is that it also protects a person’s reputation and right to privacy.
The confessional seal, Msgr. Nykiel said, “is binding not only on the confessor, but also on the interpreter, if present, and anyone who in any way, even casually, comes to know of the sins confessed.”
The church, he said, takes the seal so seriously that it forbids, on the pain of excommunication, a priest from testifying in court about what he heard in the confessional, “even if the penitent requests” he testify.
Not even the death of the penitent can absolve the confessor from the obligation to maintain the secret, Msgr. Nykiel said.
We don’t celebrate it.
Now it’s your turn. Where is Pope, Assumption of Mary, confession booth and perpetual virginity, relics, veneration of angels, veneration of dead saints, the celibacy of the priesthood, etc in the Bible?
That is true for me, too. I had never heard of it before reading about it here.
I do not know where you live but I have never heard of this until reading about it here.
Where in the Bible is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary?
BULL!
THis is EXACTLY what Rome teaches!
So MANY red herrings; so LITTLE time.
Didn’t you guys COMPILE the Bible?
Some CATHOLIC today whining about the CURRENT pope!
...just think, you found LUTHER who was a real badass for standing up to the imperial power of ROME!
So that undoubtedly in your mind discredits the entire PROTESTant Movement ....good luck with that....
Run out to left field to try to catch THIS high fly!
After you quit beating your wife; of course.
Here; let me help out a bit more...
Revelation 22:5
There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
Has GOD?
Isaiah 5:20
Not true.
Everything a person needs to know in order to be saved is to be found in the Bible.
Provided that the meaning of what is contained there is not distorted or suppressed on account of ideology.
Nowhere. But did I say this is a problem?
Answer this question:
Since we know that Christians, from the earliest times, treasured and venerated relics (We have Jesus’ shroud, much of the true cross, the bones of many of the apostles, etc.) why do we have not a particle of a bone from the body of Mary? Not only that, there is not a trace of anybody’s ever even CLAIMING to have had a tiniest relic from the body of Mary.
My own explanation for the complete absence of even a CLAIMED relic of Mary is that even all the would-be fraudsters knew that no such claim would be believed, because belief in the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven was always universal among Christians.
Do you have an alternative credible explanation for the complete absence of any claim of a relic from the body of Mary?
But the passage says that the dead will NEVER AGAIN be anything but dead.
You are able to reconcile that passage with belief in the resurrection of the dead?
I agree.
Darned ol' invisible font!!
Ecclesiastes 9:5
For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. 6 Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun.
Arguing from LACK of evidence??
You leaped at a cheap shot. But you don’t seem to have studied logic.
No. My argument is NOT “from an absence of evidence.” My argument is that the absence of certain phenomena IS EVIDENCE.
If Reponse X absolutely MUST follow Stimulus Y, then the absence of Response X proves the absence of Stimulus Y.
It’s a perfectly valid form of argument.
The dog that did not bark. The absence of DNA. The alarm that didn’t go off. The door that wasn’t forced. Such things are evidence in investigations all the time.
We know that the early Christians treasured, venerated, and preserved relics. Mary was the most venerated person in the early Church—more than any of the apostles. Yet, no relics and not even any CLAIM of a relic.
The absence of relics from history proves the absence of a body. No tomb. No relics. Nothing.
The absence of any CLAIM (even a fraudulent claim) proves the absence of any motive for a claim. And the only way there could be no motive for a claim is that all potential fraudsters were aware that all Christians believed in the Assumption, and thus no one would believe in any claimed relic.
There was no corpse, and there was universal belief, from the earliest days, in the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven.
That explains the facts.
Once again, do you have an alternate explanation? This time, try to come up with a response that isn’t logically invalid.
This is your MISSING evidence.
Your chosen religion has created this 'fact' retroactively.
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