Tuesday, June 21, 2016

It's the end of marriage as we know it--and he feels fine.

Some additional thoughts on the pope's latest joy-buzzer pronouncement.

1. You'd think that the total failure of the Church's sanctifying mission with respect to the sacrament of marriage would not be brought up offhand in response to a question, but would be front and center, an all-hands-on-deck moment. And it would be delivered in a tone of horror, not with the offhand sadness of an American who just saw a CNN report about a typhoon hitting Bangladesh. 

2. In fact, you'd think that he might have hit us with this crucial supposed fact during, I don't know...one of those Synod on the Family confabs we just suffered through twice during the past two years? 

"Oh, hai, guys--I think we might want to talk about the fact we're running nullity factories in every diocese in the world, and might want to do something about that. Sound good?"

Did he? Did anyone? Cardinal Kasper did, but it too was offhand, and not during the Synod. And he was sneered at by the pope's electric Praetorians...who again proved to be as reliable as a rain dance.

So, apart from that, was this Church-shaking fact broached? Nope. 

3. Another ideal spot to maybe enlighten everyone about this continuing disaster would have been in Amoris Laetitia, but... again, nada.

4. Finally, he's been a priest for nearly fifty years. He's part and parcel of this explosion of allegedly invalid marriages. But do you see the slightest glimmer of a mea culpa, of ownership here? Nope. Apparently, like typhoons, bad things just happen to good bishops.

So, if you're wondering about why I don't take the "great majority of marriages are null" blurtation seriously, there you go. Taken together, he's just engaged in the equivalent of dorm-room spitballing.


3 comments:

  1. On the slight chance that we have any worthwhile Catholic journalists left, it might be worth someone's time to inquire into the state of marriage prep in the Diocese of Buenos Aires between 1998 and 2013.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good question, Murray.

    I don't have information on that, but sacramental marriages dropped significantly in that time frame.

    I know a little more about ordinations. Buenos Aires has gone from 200 seminarians in 1990 to about 80 today. When Bergoglio took over as ordinary, they were ordaining something like 40 odd priests per year. This year, they are ordaining 3 men.

    The Catholic population of Buenos Aires is about 3 million.

    ReplyDelete

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