Rebutting the prebuttals of 'Amoris Laetitia' | National Catholic Reporter

Rebutting the prebuttals of 'Amoris Laetitia' | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: en curtain raisers.  I will repeat them here.



Weigel and the Council of Trent totally misunderstand worthiness to receive Communion, as Garry Wills pointed out in his book Why Priests? It is not a matter of inflexible doctrine as it is about flexible history (which Pius tried to settle in his condemnation of Modernism - Modernism won). Even granting the current thinking on what receiving in a state of sin, the Pope can still declare whether some actions are gravely sinful or not. For instance, scripturally, masturbation is probably equivalent to nocturnal emissions. In Torah, the penalty for that is staying away from people until the pool warms up enough to take a cleansing bath. Hardly damnation there. The same level of sin exists in gay marriage (or not at all) and finding love a second time (not sinful). Of course, when the divorce is for cause, like violence or alcoholism, I would give the aggrieved party full freedom and the offending party no freedom unless the aggrieved spouse grants it. This puts the power in the couple, not in the clergy. Sadly, the clergy are not mature enough to handle that.



John Allen hits the nail on the head in Crux. This exhortation is likely to affirm what is already the case among many Catholics, even when divorce is not the issue. There are a variety of former "mortal sins" that many Catholics are not bothered about - chief among them contraception - as well as missing Mass. They are things that don't get confessed because no one wants to go to confession and argue that they don't believe they have sinned seriously. Reforming reception of Communion rules will simply codify that. This will be a mercy in the pews, with the acknowledged noise in the left and right blogospheres.



I will add Faggioli's piece as well from yesterday.  On Faggioli's piece, I suspect he has caught the moods of both the conservatives and those who are open to change. I am interested in what he says (since I am in the middle of a divorce - and maybe an annulment - but as interested in how he says it. Is he going to proclaim truths or is he going to give administrative direction (changes to praxis) with some linkage to dogma, but not much of one? How is he going to handle the infallibilty of the Magisterium? Again, will he be proclaiming Truth or will he simply be giving instruction? My bet is that he will act with humility - and that will bother the conservatives to no end. I bet they would rather have an infallible answer that they disagree with than an answer which gives no consideration to infallibility at all. The best way to kill the pernicious trend to self-absorbed absolutism to simply stop mentioning it.