News Briefs

German bishops say the divorced-and-remarried may receive Communion

February 1, 2017 CNA Daily News 1

Cologne, Germany, Feb 1, 2017 / 11:29 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The German bishops have published their own guidelines on Amoris laetitia allowing, in certain cases, for divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

The decision by the German bishops’ conference comes on the heels of a similar announcement made by the bishops of Malta.

While the German bishops emphasized that access to the sacraments is a question of each individual case, the new guidelines do allow the “possibility of receiving the sacraments in these situations.”

Titled “The joy of Love, which is lived in Families, is also the Joy of the Church,” the guidelines issed by the permanent council of the German bishops’ conference were released Feb. 1 and bear the subtitle “An invitation to a Renewed Marriage and Family Pastoral Care in Light of Amoris laetitia.”

The German bishops’ conference’s permanent council meets five or six times a year, and “each [German] diocesan bishop has seat [sic] and vote in the permanent council and can send an auxiliary bishop as his representative to the meetings.

In the document, the German bishops said that accompanying couples in crisis, divorce, and remarriage is “a great challenge and an opportunity to bring the Church and her understanding of marriage.”

“For the question of the reception of the sacraments, the bishops do not see in Amoris laetitia a general rule or an automatism, but rather, they are convinced that discerned solutions which do justice to the individual case are required,” they said.

In regards to Amoris laetitia, the bishops said they will proceed “from a process of discernment, accompanied by a pastoral worker.”

However, they also clarified that “not all faithful whose marriage is broken and who are divorced and civilly remarried, can receive the sacraments without distinction.”

In a statement released alongside the guidelines, the bishops praised Amoris laetitia for its “pastoral and theological benefits” and for introducing what they called four pillars “of a pastoral approach to marriage and family pastoral care.”

These pillars are: marriage preparation; marriage accompaniment; strengthening the family as a place of learning the faith; and dealing with fragility through accompaniment, discernment, and integration.

While the first three pillars are covered in just one or a few graphs, the fourth is the core of the new guidelines.

The bishops acknowledge that marriage is indissoluble, but at the same time argue that specific attention should be given to persons’ individual situations and that judgements “which do not take into account the complexity of the various situations” should be avoided.

Referencing sections 296 and 297 of Amoris laetitia, the German bishops said that “with the guiding concepts” of accompaniment, discernment, and integration, those affected “must be helped.”

While accompaniment requires “encouraging people on the way of life and the Gospel,” they said discernment should not stop at what the objective moral situation of those affected is.

On this point, they referenced footnote 351 of Amoris laetitia, in which Pope Francis wrote: “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, ‘I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy’. I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’.”

The German bishops’ conference commented: “At the end of such a spiritual process, which is always concerned with integration, not in every case will there be a reception of the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist.”

The bishops stressed that “the individual decision of whether one, under the respective circumstances, is able to receive the sacraments, deserve respect and recognition. However, the decision to receive the sacraments must also be respected.”

At the conclusion of the document the bishops encouraged those who want to pursue marriage and family life in the Church “to personally acquaint themselves with the groundbreaking text that is Amoris laetitia.”

A divided stance

Bishops from Germany who had already advocated admitting the divorced-and-remarried to Communion included Cardinal Walter Kasper; Cardinal Reinhard Marx; Bishop Franz-Josef Bode; and Archbishop Heiner Koch.

However, despite the factions of bishops who seem to be opening the door to a path to admitting divorced-and-remarried Catholics to Communion, many are still resistant to the idea, including some heavy-hitters who are themselves German.

Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, president emeritus of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, was one of four signatories of a letter containing five “dubia” submitted to the Pope in September asking him to clarify ambiguous parts of Amoris laetitia, and which was later published.

Other prelates with German roots who have been outspoken against the proposal to admit the divorced-and-remarried to Communion include Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI; Cardinal Paul Cordes; Bishop Stefan Oster; Bishop Konrad Zdarsa; Bishop Gregor Hanke; Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer; Bishop Friedhelm Hofmann; Bishop Wolfgang Ipolt; Archbishop Ludwig Schick; and Cardinal Joachim Meisner.

In addition, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has on multiple occasions maintained that Amoris laetitia is in continuity with Church teaching.

In an interview with Italian monthly Il Timone published the same day the German bishops’ guidelines were released, the cardinal stressed that “it is not right that so many bishops are interpreting Amoris laetitia according to their way of understanding the pope’s teaching.”

“This does not keep to the line of Catholic doctrine,” he said, stressing that Amoris laetitia “must clearly be interpreted in the light of the whole doctrine of the Church.”

Having so many bishops split off with their own interpretations “does not keep to the line of Catholic doctrine,” he said, adding that the Pope’s magisterium is able to be interpreted only by him or by the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation.

“The Pope interprets the bishops, it is not the bishops who interpret the Pope; this would constitute an inversion of the structure of the Catholic Church,” he said, telling the bishops “who are talking too much” to first “study the doctrine (of the councils) on the papacy and the episcopate.”

As someone who teaches the Word of God to others, a bishop must himself “be the first to be well-formed so as not to fall into the risk of the blind leading the blind.”

Cardinal Müller pointed to Familiaris consortio, St. John Paul II’s 1981 exhortation on the Christian family in the modern world, in which the Polish Pope stipulated that the divorced-and-remarried who for serious reasons cannot separate, in order to receive absolution in confession which would open the way to receiving Communion, must take on the duty to live in complete continence.

This aspect of the text, Cardinal Müller said, “it is not dispensable, because it is not only a positive law of John Paul II, but he expressed an essential element of Christian moral theology and the theology of the sacraments.”

Confusion on this point, he said, stems from a failure to accept  St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor, which taught that there are intrinsically evil acts, that absolute truths exist across various cultures, and urged sharp caution against moral relativism and the misuse of conscience to justify false or subjective morals.

For Christians, “marriage is the expression of participation in the unity between Christ the bridegroom and the Church his bride,” he said, adding that “this is not, as some said during thesynod, a simple vague analogy. No! This is the substance of the sacrament, and no power in heaven or on earth, neither an angel, nor the Pope, nor a council, nor a law of the bishops, has the faculty to change it.”

The prelate then suggested that in order to quell the confusion generated by the differing interpretations of Amoris laetitia, everyone ought to study the Church’s doctrine, beginning with Scripture, “which is very clear on marriage.”

He advised against “entering into any casuistry that can easily generate misunderstandings, above all that according to which if love dies, then the marriage bond is dead.”

“These are sophistries: the Word of God is very clear and the Church does not accept the secularization of marriage,” he said. The task of priests and bishops, then, “is not that of creating confusion, but of bringing clarity.”

Cardinal Müller stressed that amid the ongoing debate, “one cannot refer only to little passages” present in Amoris laetitia, but must read the document “as a whole, with the purpose of making the Gospel of marriage and the family more attractive for persons.”

“All of us must understand and accept the doctrine of Christ and of his Church, and at the same time be ready to help others to understand it and put it into practice even in difficult situations.”

Anian Christoph Wimmer contributed to this report.

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Krakow’s new archbishop talks St. John Paul II and Divine Mercy

February 1, 2017 CNA Daily News 0

Rome, Italy, Feb 1, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The archdiocese that once sent St. John Paul II to the papacy has a new archbishop: Marek Jedraszewski. The archbishop has special memories of the sainted Pope and the Divine Mercy devotion he brought to the world.

“Thanks to Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, later St. John Paul II, the message of mercy became very important for the world. And this is a message really close to Pope Francis, too,” Archbishop Jedraszewski told CNA.

Krakow is a major center of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy devotion, based on private revelations of Jesus Christ to St. Faustina Kowalska. It hosts Sister Faustina’s convent and a shrine dedicated to Divine Mercy. St. John Paul II was himself a devotee and a popularizer of the Divine Mercy.

But the devotion itself began in the Archdiocese of Lodz, Archbishop Jedraszewski’s previous assignment.

“It is really symbolic that I am coming from Lodz, where the Divine Mercy devotion began, to Krakow, where the devotion flourished. In the Lodz cathedral, Sr. Faustina saw Jesus who told her to enter the convent in Warsaw. The beginning of her spiritual life started in Lodz.”

For this reason, he added, “I feel committed to prolong this mission of mercy in Krakow, even to welcome all of the people coming to Krakow to pray over Sr. Faustina tombs, and actually touch the places Sr. Faustina lived.”

Archbishop Jedraszewski leads the archdiocese that at one time was headed by Cardinal Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II in the 1978 conclave. The archbishop recalled his friendship with the late Pope.
 
The new archbishop of Krakow said that their relationship started back in 1975, when he was living at the Polish College in Rome to study philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

“Cardinal Wojtyla used to come often to Rome, and stayed at the same college,” he said. “Cardinal Wojtyla was really interested in young Polish students, he spent much time with them, and so he did with me,” he recounted. “As I was studying philosophy, a subject he was very fond of, there were many possibilities to talk and discuss with him about philosophy.”
 
After Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope, Archbishop Jedraszewski kept a personal correspondence with him, “in particular when I was appointed bishop, since John Paul II always wanted Polish bishops who passed in Rome to spend a lunch or a dinner with him.”
 
The installation Mass of Archbishop Jedraszewski came in a favorable moment for Polish Catholicism. The latest figures of the Polish Church’s yearbook show a slight increase in the numbers of Sunday Mass attendance, as well as the number of communicants. About 40 percent of Poles attend daily Mass, while about 17 percent receive Holy Communion each Sunday.

The research also stressed the strong commitment of lay people in the Church. In Poland there are some 60,000 organizations involving about 2.5 million people.
 
Archbishop Jedraszewski told CNA that World Youth Day 2017 was “a convincing testimony that Poland cannot be considered a de-Christianized country.”

He noted that the statistics indicate growth not only in the traditionally devout southern Poland, but also in Lodz, a “highly secularized area.”

He concluded that “in the end, we may say that there is an increase of faith in Poland. On the other hand, it is true that challenges given from the secularizing trends are big.”
 
Archbishop Jedraszewski raised the issue of secularization with Pope Francis, during the Polish bishops’ meeting with the pontiff July 27. During that meeting, Pope Francis stressed the danger of gender ideology.

The archbishop also saw this approach to gender as a threat. He said Benedict XVI had affirmed gender theory as more dangerous than Marxist and Communist ideology because “it breaks with the anthropological vision of what the man his according the work of the Creator God.”
 
“God created the man as male and female, while gender ideology does everything possible to cancel differences between man and woman,” Archbishop Jedraszewski said. “This is absurd from a biological point of view, and it does not deals just with the human being: gender ideology has dramatic consequences in social life and in current culture.”
 
In the end “we cannot be open to this ideology, that is profoundly against God the Creator and against everything Christ himself taught us.”

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How to watch the Super Bowl with a clean conscience

February 1, 2017 CNA Daily News 0

Washington D.C., Feb 1, 2017 / 01:59 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Super Bowl Sunday. It’s as American as apple pie, but in recent years, controversy has erupted over the beloved American pastime and – considering the risk it poses – whether or not the game of football is even worth it.

Whether one is a devoted football fan, or only watches once a year, Super Bowl Sunday holds a place as a major event for people across the country. However, some say that aspects such as commercialism, graphic content, and the life-changing injuries sustained by players should make Catholics think critically about the game they’re seeing, even as they cheer on the teams before them.

“I love football and in fact it would be difficult to find someone who loves football more than I do,” said Charles Camosy, professor of ethics at Fordham University. He even credits football for his existence, given that his parents met on a train to the Notre Dame-Alabama Sugar Bowl game in 1973. 

But despite his love for the game, Camosy said there are a variety of potentially troubling aspects about the Super Bowl. From the often lewd commercials and halftime show to the sometimes cult-like intensity of the fans and violence of the game itself, viewers must take care in how they view the Big Game, he said.

“The key is to be hyper aware of what this is, what you’re doing, and where you stand,” Camosy told CNA. “Be aware that we need to resist those things. Even call it out as you’re watching.” 

While the Super Bowl is the most-watched television event in the U.S., there is growing concern that behind the screen and underneath the helmet, the brains of the players competing in the Super Bowl are sustaining potentially life-altering damage. 

Within the past decade, researchers at various institutions have noted a link between repetitive brain trauma sustained in football – including hits that produce no immediate symptoms – and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Also known as CTE, the degenerative brain disease triggers progressive brain damage, and symptoms include memory loss, impulse control, depression and progressive dementia. The mental health problems created by CTE have also been linked to suicidal thoughts and attempts by former professional football players. 

CTE has been found in 96 percent of NFL players whose brains were submitted for a 2015 analysis by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University. The disease was also found in 71 percent of all football players – including high school players – whose postmortem samples were submitted for research.

This risk for life-changing brain damage, Camosy said, is “built into football.” 

“There are certain things built into football, at least the way we play the game now, that aren’t built into soccer” and other sports, he suggested. 

“Given what we now know and given how central violence is to the game, that gives another reason perhaps to resist this.” 

Camosy has written several essays on the morality of America’s football culture. He suggests that it is “morally problematic” to support a game that is so deeply intertwined with violence and connected to long-lasting damage for those who partake in it.

He pointed to the criticism voiced by Church Fathers including Tertullian for the Roman gladiator games and the Christians who went to see them. In his treatises, Tertullian slammed the games’ idolatry, the justifications for their bloody nature, the public’s addiction to watching them, and the violence of the matches themselves.

Many of these criticisms of the gladiatorial games, Camosy continued, are relevant to the way football is played today. “We prefer not to look at the violence. We somehow make it compatible with the non-violence Jesus calls us to,” he said.

Chad Pecknold, a professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at The Catholic University of America, had a different perspective.

While the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire and American football today have some similarities – and can provide insight into the respective cultures that created them – there are also important differences, he said.

Most obviously, imminent death was a prominent characteristic of the gladiator games, in a way that is not characteristic of football.

“The Roman gladiatorial games were a by-product of war, and in this sense they were a potent cultural expression of Rome’s ‘lust for domination,’” Pecknold said.

While theologians such as St. Augustine taught that in some circumstances, the violence of war could be justified, they criticized Rome’s approach to war and found that when the “horrific violence” of war was turned solely into entertainment in the gladiatorial games, that the games “were more pernicious than war itself,” he continued.

American football, Pecknold suggested, does not carry the exact same significance the early Christians cautioned against.

Still, he said, there is reason for caution with football.  

“I am not sure if we should worry about football in the same way that the early Church fathers worried about gladiatorial spectacle, but we should pay attention to how easily the goodness of sports can be disordered.”

Both Camosy and Pecknold acknowledged positive aspects to the game of football – including the God-given athletic talent, strategy and teaching of virtue, as well as the game’s ability to bring together families and communities. 

“If it can serve the common good of the family, the neighborhood, the community, then it’s really terrific and we should thank God for it,” Pecknold said.

But that affection can quickly become disordered and occupy a disproportionate place in people’s lives, he cautioned. And the commercial aspect of football, which grows out of the economy, can also be concerning because of what it reflects about the culture.

Ultimately, he said, when approaching the Super Bowl and its content, “Christians can watch football with a clean conscience, but they might want to turn off the halftime show.”

Camosy agreed that it is possible to watch the Super Bowl with a clean conscience, but suggested that Christians avoid being drawn into the negative elements, perhaps by openly “(making) fun of the commercials and what the half-time show is all about.” He also warned Catholics who watch the Super Bowl to be wary of their own focuses and care for the game, and to be careful, when cheering for teams, “that we don’t create another source of ultimate concern here – that this isn’t another god.”

And Catholics should speak up about the violence that plagues the game, Camosy said.

“What I call for is a similar kind of shift that happened almost a hundred years ago,” he said, recalling Teddy Roosevelt’s reforms to the game when college students were dying during matches.

“Leave the good – get rid of the bad.”

This article was originally published Feb. 6, 2016.

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Boy Scouts accepts gender identity as new standard for admission

February 1, 2017 CNA Daily News 0

Dallas, Texas, Jan 31, 2017 / 05:19 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Citing legal and community changes, the Boy Scouts of America have said self-declared gender identity now determines youth eligibility for its scouting programs. The move could add new difficulties for Catholic sponsors of scout troops trying to adapt to the organization’s relatively new policy on homosexuality.

“Starting today, we will accept and register youth in the Cub and Boy Scout programs based on the gender identity indicated on the application,” the Boy Scouts of America said Jan. 30.

The statement said its local councils will “help find units that can provide for the best interest of the child.”

The statement said Cub Scouting and Boy Scouting are “specifically designed to meet the needs of boys.” In previous years, the organizations have used individuals’ birth certificates to determine whether they are eligible for single-sex programs.

“However, that approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state,” the statement said.

The new policy comes after a transgender child in New Jersey was asked to leave the Cub Scouts late last year. The child’s pack was hosted by Immaculate Conception parish in Secaucus. The child had told CNN that “it’s not fair because my friends get to do it, but I can’t.”

CNA contacted the National Catholic Committee on Scouting for comment but did not receive a response by deadline.

The Boy Scouts of America had announced in July 2015 that it would adopt a non-discrimination policy allowing homosexuals to be scout leaders and volunteers. The decision promised that churches with objections to homosexual behavior could set their own standards for affiliated organizations.

Bishop David Kagan of Bismarck, himself a former boy scout, in summer 2015 reluctantly told his North Dakota diocese to disaffiliate from the Boy Scouts of America due to the legal risks and the moral confusion its leadership policy could cause for Catholics.

He said the policy could risk lawsuits for church-sponsored troops that attempt to hold their leaders and volunteers to Catholic moral standards.

Bishop Kagan lamented the goals of those who sought the policy change to “redefine what is acceptable and unacceptable in society.”

At the same time, the bishop suggested that the Boy Scouts of America would not be able to defend the previous policy in court given trends in the American legal system.

However, Bishop Robert Guglielmone of Charleston, a leading member of the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, had recommended “cautious optimism” towards that policy change, voicing hope that Catholic churches could still use Boy Scouts of America programs in a way consistent with Church teaching.

He said Catholic-chartered scouting units are “the only way we can have a direct influence” on Catholic youth involved in scouting.

At the same time, the bishop acknowledged there is no way Catholics can control the material in Boy Scout programs, merit badge material, and its Boys’ Life magazine.

Bishop Kagan recommended alternatives to the Boy Scouts, enumerating the Federation of North American Explorers, the Columbian Squires, and Trail Life USA. He also recommended alternatives to the Girl Scouts, listing American Heritage Girls, Little Flowers’ Girls Clubs, and the Federation of North American Explorers.

There are about 2.3 million members of Boy Scouts of America groups between the ages of 7 and 21. President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Rex W. Tillerson, is a past national president of the Boy Scouts of America and served on its executive board in 2013 when it voted to lift the ban on homosexual scouts, The New York Times reports.

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