Sunday, December 22, 2013

Two stories relating to Rome

Cardinal Kasper says Church will soon give Communion to divorced, remarried Catholics

My take; we will see. There are limits to what even the Pope can do and I can't see this happening without fundamentally weakening RC teachings concerning divorce and remarriage. Oddly, neither we Orthodox nor Roman Catholics seem to include this on the usual lists of major differences dividing us, but it's a pretty big issue. Absent a shift by Rome, how could communion be restored between our churches with millions of divorced and remarried Orthodox admitted to the chalice?

'Who am I to judge?': The pope's most powerful phrase in 2013

There are many things that I deeply admire about the new Pope. But dear God, I do wish he would be more careful with his off the cuff statements. The Episcopal wing of the Catholic Church and large numbers of equally hostile non-Catholics are using his words, sometimes unfairly, to undermine the Roman Church's authority. He needs to remember who he is and accept that everything he says and does will be dissected and parsed by people who are not friendly to his church.

2 comments:

lannes said...

"Who am I to judge?" If the Pope
doesn't know who he is, then back
to Argentina or wherever he came from.

James the Thickheaded said...

lannes: Paul writes something similar in Romans 14:4 about not being able to judge the servant of another (meaning Christ). Shouldn't be surprising.

Personally, I think the Pope knows exactly who he is. The problem is the opposite: That folks want to forget that he is the pope... and take his comments out of the context in which they are said. It's their/our nominalism and buffet selectivity at work. I expect this is a bit foreign in concept to Pope Francis... so thinking he'll "just get it" is probably not going to happen. I doubt this is new or unusual... just more obvious I think in this case because a wider audience's shared sympathies make the disconnects more clear.