Le Divorce, Part Deux
First report posted here yesterday.... From CNS today:
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"The pope is not a prophet," he told the priests. "He is infallible in very rare circumstances, as we all know."Fascinating. I will have something else in this vein within the hour. Stay tuned.
Therefore, he said, in trying to find ways to spread the Gospel, to strengthen the faith of Catholics and to help the suffering, "I share your questions. I, too, suffer."
Asked specifically about ministry to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, Pope Benedict told the priests, "None of us has a ready-made solution, including because each person's situation is different."
"I would say that a particularly painful situation is that of those who were married in the church, but were not really believers and did so just for tradition, and then finding themselves in a new, nonvalid marriage, convert, find the faith and feel excluded from the sacrament," he said.
Pope Benedict said that when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he asked several bishops' conferences and experts to study the problem, which in effect was "a sacrament celebrated without faith."
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posted by Rocco Palmo at 17:16
2 Comments:
Fascinating. It almost sounds as if he is musing about extending the logic of the "privilege of the faith" to the situation of the nominal Catholic.
I agree. This would make my work at the parish level so much more compassionate. So often marraiges are entered into before faith is obtained and I have to tell someone that they aren't welcome in the church because of a marriage that they entered into before they believed.
This will be be interesting.
Maggie
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