UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
By Patricia Miller October 9, 2015
As the first week of the second installment of the bishops’ synod on the family draws to a close, it seems that some of the bishop participants haven’t gotten the memo from Pope Francis that they’re supposed to find ways to change the church without really changing the church.
On Monday, Hungarian Cardinal Péter Erdő, the secretary of the synod, sought to strike a preemptive blow for conservatives, who were blindsided by resurgent progressives last fall pushing for more leeway for divorced and gay Catholics. Erdő declared that it would be impossible to find a way to extend communion to divorced and remarried Catholics, as suggested by German Cardinal Walter Kasper, because they are living in sin. “It is not the failing of the first marriage but the living in a second relationship that impedes access to the Eucharist,” he said, arguing that only by agreeing to live chastely could such Catholics be readmitted to communion.
He also threw cold water on any pastoral talk of being more welcoming to LGBT couples in committed relationship, which last year’s synod praised as having “positive values”: “There is no basis for comparing or making analogies, even remotely, between homosexual unions and God’s plan for matrimony and the family.”
As John Allen reports in Crux, Erdő’s remarks prompted Italian Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli to ask “what are we doing here?” if any changes in even pastoral practice were off the table.
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