I received an email from blog reader John L. with some extremely significant quotes from the Pope's impromptu flying press conference. Some of them deal with touchy issues dividing Rome from Orthodoxy including the question of the sacraments for the divorced and remarried while others speak rather kindly of our liturgical praxis. Rather than paraphrasing I am going to append the entire email below. On a side note I deeply appreciate the tips I get from blog readers. Obviously I can't spend the entire day wandering the web and even if I could I would not be able to touch even a fraction of the often blogworthy stuff that's out there.
Emphasis is mine...
Trad blogs are obsessed with either the gay comments or the Latin Mass, but there was more. The way Francis' presents himself on issues... it's a bit like grasping jello, or picking up tofu with chopsticks. But sedecvacantist priest Fr. Cekeda noticed all of these things at Rorate Caeli's comments...
Check out this bit on divorce and remarriage. This is a huge issue that affects far more Catholics and ex-Catholics than the media fixation on gays. Cekada calls divorced/married Catholics "adulterers", but Pope Francis described this attitude as "clericalism".
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/the-vatican/detail/articolo/gmg-26831//pag/2/
>>The Church is a mother and in the Church we need to be merciful towards everyone. We shouldn’t just wait for the wounded to come to us, we need to go out and search for them. I think the time for mercy has come as John Paul II predicted by introducing the Feast of Divine Mercy. Divorced people can take communion, it is those who have divorced and remarried that cannot. Here I must add that the orthodox follow the theology of economics and allow second marriages. When the commission of eight cardinals meets at the beginning of October we will discuss how to proceed. The Church is taking a very close look at pastoral initiatives for marriage. My predecessor in Buenos Aires, Cardinal Quarracino always used to say: “I consider half of today’s marriages to be invalid because people get married without realising it means forever. They do it out of social convenience, etc...” The issue of invalidity needs to be looked into as well.”
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“The Orthodox Churches have preserved the liturgy which is so beautiful. We’ve lost sight slightly of the meaning of worship. They worship God and they sing about it; time is immaterial to them. One day we were speaking about Western Europe and they said that “ex Oriente lux” “ex Oriente luxus”, meaning that light comes from the East and consumerism and wealth which do a lot of harm, come from the West. The Orthodox Church preserves the beauty of God being at the centre of everything. When you read Dostoevsky you can really feel the Russian and Oriental spirit. We are deeply in need of this breath of fresh air, this light from the East.”
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Do check out the linked article.
The Gospel Preached to the Patriarch Abraham
17 hours ago
6 comments:
Funny how the media missed all that.
I think that we should view the imminent restriction of the FFI's right to offer Mass in the EF in the light of Pope Francis' comments on the Orthodox style of worship. One cannot denigrate the EF whilst at the same time praising the beauty of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.
I think it's fairly clear that the pope can express admiration for Eastern liturgy while disapprove of Tridentine liturgy because the former doesn't have political and theological baggage in his part of the world, while the latter very much does... I'm under the impression that support of and opposition to Tridentine liturgy outside the Anglo-Saxon world has very little to do with liturgy and a lot to do with how one feels about integralism.
Samn!
That is a very insightful point that I think has a lot of truth to it.
Very well stated Samn. Though I still wonder when the break came for him, and why he wasn't so adamantly and vocally opposed to the integralists when the junta ruled his country and bishops and clerics in his church were using intergralist arguments to defend the junta's brutality.
Well, my impression is that the pope is a good-natured man, but certainly no hero or martyr. It's quite possible that he has a bad taste in his memory about his time chaplaining the junta, and that might spur him to do good as pope. At least, it seems like he'll be better than his last two predecessors in many regards, whether that's motivated by his temperament or his need to atone. In that way he reminds me of Catholic churchmen I know in the Middle East who during the 80s quietly supported unspeakable things but now are on the balance good people (I'm not speaking of the ones who did evil with their own hands and now verbally advocate it, just the ones who condoned it then quietly).
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