Friday, June 12, 2015

Cardinal Antonelli's Dual Alarm on the Bishops' Synod

(Rome) Cardinal Ennio Antonelli is an acknowledged expert on the situation. The 78 year old cardinal knows whereof he speaks. From 2008-2012 he was President of the Pontifical Council for the Family. Now he has publicly warned against giving communion to remarried divorcees. Such a move would be disastrous: it would be a diminishment of the Sacrament, but also the end of the marriage sacrament.
Cardinal Antonelli organized two World Meetings of Families in 2009 in Mexico City and in 2012 in Milan.  Before Pope Benedict XVI. brought him to Rome, he was since 2001 Archbishop of Florence, and from 1995 to 2001 Secretary General of the Italian Bishops' Conference, Archbishop of Perugia from 1988 to 1995 and from 1982 to 1988 Bishop of Gubbio.

Former President of the Pontifical Council on Family offers plea for the Sacrament of Matrimony

"The crisis of marriage and the Eucharist"
Although   he was preordained, he did not   participate   on the first part of the Synod of Bishops on the family on October 2014. Pope Francis had not ranked him among the  persons appointed by him to the synod. However, he is actively involved in the current debate and in these days published a book. It is titled "Crisi del matrimonio ed eucaristia" (The Crisis of Marriage and the Eucharist" (Edizioni Ares, Milan 2015, 72 pages, 7 euros).
"This is a special book. It is handy, has little pages and reads in one breath. The foreword is by another Cardinal, Elio Sgreccia, the president from 2005-2008 of the Pontifical Academy for Life was" says the Vatican expert Sandro Magister. For reasons of age   the renowned bioethicist who was born in 1928 and 2010 elevated to the cardinalatial state  by Pope Benedict XVI., did not take part in the conclave of 2013.

Kasper proposal "unrealistic"

Cardinal Antonelli points out how the alleged restriction of admission to communion only to the divorced and remarried is "unrealistic" because the number of people who simply live together, is much larger. Due to foreseeable social pressure and due to an internal logic of the first step, those opinions would gain legitimacy therefore, arguing for an even greater flexibility. It would be then that even homosexual cohabitants will be included.
The cardinal also complains that the Eucharist will be reduced to a mere courtesy with such permissive thinking.  "In today's cultural context of relativism, there is a danger of trivializing the Eucharist and to reduce the rite to an act of  socialization. It has already happened that people who were not even baptized went to communion  because they thought to  make a gesture of courtesy, or that unbelievers demanded a right to be allowed to receive communion at weddings or funerals, just because it is seen as a sign of solidarity with their friends."

"Between good and evil, there is no gradualness" - answer to Schönborn's Gradualitätsthese

Foreword by Cardinal Elio Sgreccia, Former President of the Pontifical Academy for Life
In response to the theses of gradualness which were put forward by the Viennese Archbishop Christoph Cardinal Schönborn at the Synod of Bishops in 2014, Antonelli wrote the  chapter: "Between good and evil, there is no gradualness".
Next the cardinal writes: "The admission of divorced and remarried and the cohabitants to the Eucharist is the separation of mercy and repentance, which does not seem in line with the Gospel", because forgiveness always presupposes repentance.

With Kasper  Proposal to Abandon Indissolubility of Marriage 

 The former president of the Pontifical Family Council warns that no matter what the intentions of those who are in favor of the admission of divorced and remarried to the sacraments,  the indissolubility of marriage would be abandoned. "Regardless of their intentions, it will be betrayed because of doctrinal incoherence between the authorization of these persons to the Eucharist and the indissolubility of marriage, end up in actual practice, what in theory and in principle still holds, with the risk that it reduces the indissolubility of marriage to a mere ideal,   perhaps even a beautiful one, but an ideal only accessible to the few", said the Cardinal.
"It is foreseeable that the Eucharistic Communion of remarried divorcees and cohabitants will quickly lead to a general state. Then there  will no longer be much sense to speak of the indissolubility of marriage, which is why even the celebration of the marriage sacrament is losing practical significance,"  are the words of warning of the former president of the Pontifical Family Council.

Full content available in Italian, English and Spanish on the Internet

The text of Cardinal Antonelli has published  in full   on the website of the Pontifical Council for the Family and not just in the original Italian, but also in English and Spanish translation.
"Cardinal Antonelli has presented with amiable stability and practical realism, the doctrine and the pastoral force of the Sacrament of Matrimony. Above all, he makes the untenable consequences visible, which would come with the changes now proposed at various levels of the Church," said Sandro Magister
Text: Giuseppe Nardi
Image: familiam.org/MiL

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

God Bless courageous Cardinal Antonelli ! I hope more Italian bishops and Cardinals start to rise up against Francis/Kasper and their agenda.
Francis is beginning to look very haggard....even unwell. I hope the struggle is getting to him, and he realizes that the Church is Catholic....that we value our traditions and will not go meekly down the radical road he has staked out.

I would not be surprised if before too long, Francis exits the scene in the same way Fidenzio Volpi did.

Anonymous said...

Welcome on planet Earth, card. Antonelli was crying with mons Gaenswein when pope Benedict celebrated his last Holy Mass as pontifex maximus of the RCC......after..... après de moi le déluge......hope some more courageous cardinals will speak in defense of Catholic faith, the only one,'cauz Christ is the only one Way. God bless+

Anonymous said...

Your blog ate my post!

Guess I am done here for good, and the hoops one has to jump through now simply to post are hideous and insulting.

Tancred said...

Are what post? If you've been annoying in the past, insulting, and so on as many are wont to be, your posts might be going to the junk pit, but the spam filter may have id'd your post as junk in error, so I'll check.

The captchas keep down spam, and you're supposed to sign your anonymous posts...

Anonymous said...

I did not mean to violate the signiong protocol. That was an oversight, likely in retrospect, due to the hoops. Sorry for THAT misstep.

Karl

Anonymous said...

IMO I don't trust Gaenswein, he was right there in the background helping push Pope Benedict out the door

Anonymous said...

I've basically heard as much as I care to regarding the synod and the green enclyclical, etc. I welcome this tripe so that we can start the formal schism and not have to pretend this guys is 'pope" anymore.

Anonymous said...

The schism began the moment Benedict abdicated.

Anonymous said...

It's just for this that Benedict bound him to swear to stay there usque ad effusionem sanguinis......yes, I agree, after Benedict's abdication or abduction, the RCC was openly schismatic, now we have a Roman episcopate, nothing more, nothing less.....BTW the BoR is on The Simpson's.......God bless+

Anonymous said...

Right, Pope Benedict (long live our Holy Father) resigned the active ministry not the office itself. Whether this was a simple error in the Latin of the resignation letter or a slight of hand by the Holy Father either way Bergoglio doesn't have the power Not sure he even believes in the power of the Petrine office anyway so for him he probably doesn't even care. So bring forth all this crap, say men can be married to cats for all I care, it means nothing and in God's time will be swept away.

Anonymous said...

See the post is titled so-and-so "Sounds the Alarm". When one hears an alarm one is supposed to do something, like wake up, get out of bed, run, put out the fire (w/URGENCY). But what all the people do including those who blog about these alarms is just keep sounding them and sounding them and sounding them but just standing around (just like you declare) like they mean nothing. I wonder if that's what Jesus has in mind for us to do when we are confronted w/evil. Somehow I don't think so.

Anonymous said...

Are you saying that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"?

Barnum said...

How do you know that no one else who posts here is doing anything? I venture to say that anyone who posts here and can give something to the Church, does, whether in time or money or both. Who do you think posts here, Anon 3:55? Popes and bishops? This site itself is a more serious ministry than most of those found in parishes across what was once Christendom.

Anonymous said...

Here's what I'm doing, I'm fighting the battle daily with the best weapon available, the holy rosary. I also don't give money to the collection basket which in my dioceses is funneled into CCHD and CRS two agencies which have been proven to be giving funds to anti Catholic causes. Instead my weekly donations to the Church are to the new building fund and the votive candle donation boxes. I'm not alone in this in that the traditoinal parish I attend missed it's yearly Bishop's appeal by a mile and the FSSP priest recently announced his transfer to another state. I feel he was likely transferred because of this but it' is what it is, if you know the funds are being used to subvert the faith you can in no way give any money. Watch and pray and inform anyone you can, that's what we can do now.