Vatican City, Jun 4, 2018 / 06:37 am (CNA/EWTN News).- One month after Vatican and German delegates met in Rome to discuss a proposal put forward by German bishops to allow Protestant spouses in inter-denominational marriages to receive the Eucharist in certain circumstances, Pope Francis has rejected it.
In a letter dated May 25 and addressed to Cardinal Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and president of the German bishops conference, Cardinal-elect Luis Ladaria SJ, the Vatican’s top authority on matters of doctrine, said the text of the German proposal “raises a series of problems of considerable importance.”
The letter was published June 4 on the blog of Veteran Vatican journalist Sandro Magister.
The Holy See press office has confirmed the authenticity of the letter, which was also sent to members of the German delegation who attended a May 3 meeting between German prelates and Vatican official on the topic in Rome, including Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, archbishop of Cologne; Bishop Felix Genn of Münster; Bishop Karl-Heinz Wieseman of Speyer; Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg and Bishop Gerhard Feige of Magdeburg.
After speaking with Pope Francis about the matter in light of the May 3 discussion, Ladaria said the pope “came to the conclusion that the document is not mature enough to be published,” and cited three main reasons for the decision.
First, Ladaria stressed that admission to Communion of Protestant spouses in inter-confessional marriages “is a topic that touches the faith of the Church and has relevance for the universal Church.”
Allowing non-Catholics to receive the Eucharist, even in certain limited conditions, would also have an impact on ecumenical relations with other Churches and ecclesial communities “which should not be underestimated.”
Finally, he said the question of Communion is a matter of Church law, and cited canon 844 of the Code of Canon Law, which deals with access to the Sacraments of the Catholic Church.
Specifically, canon 844 states that “Catholic ministers administer the sacraments licitly to Catholic members of the Christian faithful alone, who likewise receive them licitly from Catholic ministers alone,” apart from a number of exceptions spelled out in the canon.
These exceptions include allowing non-Catholic Christians to receive the sacraments of Confession, the Eucharist, and the Anointing of the Sick by non-Catholic ministers in churches where these sacraments are valid “whenever necessity requires it or true spiritual advantage suggests it, and provided that danger of error or of indifferentism is avoided.”
Catholic ministers, the canon says, can also administer these sacraments licitly on members of Eastern Churches that are not in full communion with Rome, “if they seek such on their own accord and are properly disposed.”
The canon says this is also valid “for members of other Churches which in the judgment of the Apostolic See are in the same condition in regard to the sacraments as these Eastern Churches.”
For non-Catholic Christians unable to approach a minister from their own confession, the canon says they are able to receive these sacraments only “if the danger of death is present or if, in the judgment of the diocesan bishop or conference of bishops, some other grave necessity urges it.”
However, to receive the sacraments they must seek reception “on their own accord, provided that they manifest Catholic faith in respect to these sacraments and are properly disposed.”
The canon concludes underlining that in the case of the exceptions, “the diocesan bishop or conference of bishops is not to issue general norms except after consultation at least with the local competent authority of the interested non-Catholic Church or community.”
In his letter to Cardinal Marx, Ladaria noted that while there are “open questions” in some sectors of the Church in regards to the interpretation of canon 844, “the competent dicasteries of the Holy See have already been charged with producing a timely clarification of these questions at the level of the universal Church.”
However, he said it would be left up to diocesan bishops to judge when there is a “grave impending need” regarding the reception of the sacraments.
Ladaria, who was recently tapped by Pope Francis to get a red hat in a consistory later this month, heads the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
His letter to German prelates follows a May 3 meeting on the topic of inter-communion between a delegation of German bishops and members of Vatican dicasteries to discuss whether the question of inter-communion for non-Catholic spouses in inter-denominational marriages could be decided at a local level, or whether it needed Vatican intervention.
The meeting was called after reports, later denied by the German bishops’ conference, came out saying the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had rejected a proposal by the German bishops to publish guidelines allowing non-Catholic spouses of Catholics to receive the Eucharist in certain limited circumstances.
In February, Cardinal Marx had announced that the German bishops conference would publish a pastoral handout explaining that Protestant spouses of Catholics “in individual cases” and “under certain conditions” could receive Holy Communion, provided they “affirm the Catholic faith in the Eucharist.”
Marx’s statement concerned a draft version of the guidelines, which was adopted “after intensive debate” during a Feb. 19-22 general assembly of the conference.
After Marx’s announcement on the inter-communion proposal, several German prelates appealed to the Vatican for clarification. Specifically, they wrote to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Council for Legislative Texts.
Signatories, who did not consult Cardinal Marx before writing the letter, included: Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg; Bishop Gregor Hanke of Eichstätt; Bishop Konrad Zdarsa of Augsburg; Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau; Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg; Bishop Wolfgang Ipolt of Görlitz and Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, archbishop of Cologne.
None of the signatories, apart from Cardinal Woelki, were present for the May 3 meeting at the Vatican, which was held at the Vatican.
Members of the German delegation for the May 3 meeting also included: Cardinal Marx; Bishop Genn; Bishop Wiesemann, president of the Doctrinal Commission for the German bishops conference; Bishop Feige, president of the German bishops’ Commission for Ecumenism; Bishop Voderholzer of Regensburg, and Fr. Hans Langendörfer SJ, secretary of the German bishops conference.
On the Vatican side, the meeting was attended by: Archbishop Ladaria; Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; Msgr. Markus Graulich, undersecretary for the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts and Fr. Hermann Geissler, who serves as a kind of office manager for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
After the meeting, Ladaria was tasked with recounting the details of the discussion to Pope Francis. In his May 25 letter to Marx, Ladaria said he spoke to the pope about it May 11, and again May 24. It was after these discussions, he said, that Francis decided the inter-communion guidelines put forward by Cardinal Marx could not be published.
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You go first, Francis. Show us your devotion to the Word of God, and to service of others. Then we can follow what you do, but not that which (only) you say.
“Preach the Gospel at all times; use words when necessary.”
The Holy Father’s exegesis is itself closed. God can save “closed Christians”. At the end the Holy Father mentions that God can make the deaf hear and the dumb speak. Well, God also can stop up your hearing and your ability to speak what He wants.
But it is flawed in other ways. For example, leading people into temptation -whether in the name of fraternity or the Name of Jesus or the name of charity or the name of being open or whatever name- is not the Gospel and is not speaking of Jesus.
We do not exchange our baptism for the human virtue of brotherliness. To do that comes up to Pelagianism. VATICAN II recommends the practice of human virtues in charity because it is most fitting the call to holiness and the apostolates for these times.
In the first place the fruit of the Holy Ghost is not brotherliness but benignity. And the fruits are not summed up in brotherliness but in magnifying God in His gifts. Holy Father presents the danger not merely in what he says but also in what he does.
In its best light, might we suppose that Pope Francis goes overboard, or maybe only backwards, in his style or sequence of inculturation? Two quotes and a proposal:
FIRST, Cardinal Danielou explains:
“Christianity is always at first [at first!] led to take a stand against the errors of paganism, it [then] goes on to take to itself the good things in it. An obvious example which offers proof of this is the evangelization of the West. Christianity has taken up all that was valuable in the religions of Greece and Rome. Shrines of pagan goddesses became shrines of the Virgin Mary, and the seasonal pagan feasts were displaced by Christmas and Candlemas […] Christianity lifts them up, purifies them, and transfigures them” (“Prayer as a Political Problem,” 1953, p. 91).
SECOND, related to which, and possibly explaining the way-station of pluralist (?) “fraternity,” the Anglican convert, Fr. George William Rutler, gives us this:
“We might say that the cardinal virtues have their counterparts in the quadrivium: music and justice are both sciences of harmony; arithmetic and prudence are sciences of order; geometry and temperance are sciences of transcendence. And the theological virtues comport themselves with the fundamental trivium: grammar being to discourse what faith is to supernatural conversion; rhetoric being to grammar what hope is morally to faith; and dialectic providing a natural analogy of the heavenly discourse of love, just as love is the highest logic of creation. It is an arbitrary scheme, to be sure, but a fair reminder of the community between natural and spiritual sciences” (“Beyond Modernity: Reflections of a Post-Modern Catholic,” Ignatius, 1987, p. 123).
PROPOSAL: “The community between natural AND spiritual sciences”?
Which is to propose that once the Church gets back to making an “un-mess” [!] of things, the prevailing disconnect between so-called “concrete” experiences and so-called “abstract” rigidities might draw from reflections such as these…BECAUSE these frontward reflections are, today, messily perceived and branded as “backwardist.”
(Still, at the Synod on Youth, exchanging the papal crozier for a Wiccan stang was a bit much. Also, housing Pachamama within St. Peter’s Basilica on the same floor as the tabernacle and Real Presence.)
The “abstract rigidities” could be misnomer, Beaulieu, or a misconstrued business (or something off). In different senses too.
For Pope Francis the rigidity is the problem whether it is to do with abstraction or anything else. He is saying either grace is incipiently blocked or virtue is lacking.
I don’t accept it merely on such terms. A priest RIP of the “Francis” type mold used to converse at length about all kinds of things some of it plain out NOT our faith; eg., “Trinity” is “God with 3 hats”.
Trinity is God with 3 chips? Chocolate chips? Raiding the ref? Passing in the night? With 3 hats?
Here you encounter loose wobbly abstracting that is not “rigid” itself but is not our belief. What is behind it COULD be rigid, actually; in the sense of wrong and weighed down stubbornness.
But in another mode abstracting does not produce rigidity just so nor is it a sign of blockaded grace or undeveloped virtue or style-less-ness.
One of the priests who moved my faith now deceased RIP, was brief, repetitive, rebuking, retiring; yet uniquely real and transparent. For his 10-minute homilies he merely repeated passages from the readings. That was his level of abstracting and it was effective articulation.
And the attraction was the father.
In yet a third sense, the explanation of the faith say in the outline of a heresy, ITSELF contains the cure -incipiently; when it often happens that the rigidity lies in the one doing the resisting/rejecting of the faith or resisting/rejecting of the incipient cure that is attempting to pass.
Begging your pardon sir and the Lord’s, I wished to do this well.
The Good News is healing and empowering. Long live the Good News in thought, word, and action.