This just in from LifeSiteNews — The cardinal tasked by Saint Pope John Paul II 36 years ago with founding an institute to study marriage and the family has criticized Pope Francis’ recent Apostolic Exhortation on the family for lacking clarity and causing confusion among bishops regarding perennial magisterial teaching on marriage, divorce, and reception of Holy Communion.
“Chapter 8 is, objectively, unclear,” said Cardinal Carlo Caffarra when speaking about Amoris Laetitia, since it causes “‘conflict of interpretations’ ignited even among bishops.” The comments were made last week in an interview the cardinal gave in Italian to the website La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana. READ ARTICLE HERE
REMNANT COMMENT: So yet another member of the hierarchy severs the chains of collegiality in order to break the silence and speak the truth. According to LSN, the cardinal said that despite the conflicting interpretations surrounding the exhortation, it remains the case that it is impossible for civilly divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion.
Amen to that!
The 77-year-old Cardinal Caffara, by the way, is perhaps best known for his fierce opposition to contraception over the years. In 1988, the NY Times quoted Caffara as asserting in regards to the use of condoms that acting in accord with morality outweighed any potential “physical harm”: “Even the smallest moral wrong is so much greater than any physical wrong. I know this is hard for some to accept when the dangers are great, but the church is here to combat moral wrongs.”
It would seem at this point that the defenders of Amoris Laetitia are more or less willfully blinding themselves to the myriad dangers of this revolutionary document. Hats off to Cardinal Caffara. Let us pray that this is not too little too late.
