Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, one of the two living cardinals to have signed the dubia addressed to Pope Francis, has spoken out against the “heresy” of supporting remarriage.
In a rare and lengthy interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine, Cardinal Brandmüller, the Vatican’s former chief historian, said that the Council of Trent had proclaimed the indissolubility of marriage as a dogma. This means, the cardinal said, that entering a new union after civil divorce is a grave sin.
This has consequences for the Eucharist, the cardinal said: “Whoever is aware of having committed a grave sin can only receive Communion if he has been to Confession, has confessed and has been absolved.”
Some bishops have said that the remarried can receive Communion without a resolution to live “as brother and sister”. Their argument rests on a footnote in the Pope’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
Cardinal Brandmüller said: “I am now being told that the entire moral-theological tradition of the Church can be overruled by a footnote. Here I look to the authority of the Church Fathers.”
To clarify these and other confusions, five dubia, or questions – were sent to the Pope last year by Cardinals Joachim Meisner, Carlo Caffarra (both of whom died this year), Raymond Burke and Brandmüller.
In the new interview, the cardinal defended their decision to publish the dubia. “People ask us, among other things: ‘Why aren’t you cardinals doing anything?’ After all, we have sworn an official oath and are the Pope’s advisers. We asked for an audience and received no answer.”
Francis urges Christians to save Europe from ‘sterility’
Christians are called to “revitalise Europe and to revive its conscience” amid the “dramatic sterility” the continent suffers from today, Pope Francis has said.
Speaking at a high-level meeting of politicians and Church leaders in the European Union, the Pope said this sterility was “not only because Europe has fewer children, and all too many are denied the right to be born, but also because there has been a failure to pass on the material and cultural tools that young people need to face the future”.
He said that Christians filled with joyful hope must seek to awaken “new energies” in society. “The first and perhaps the greatest contribution that Christians can make to today’s Europe is to remind her that she is not a mass of statistics or institutions, but is made up of people,” he said.
The Pope lamented that issues are reduced to questions of numbers. “There are no citizens, only votes. There are no migrants, only quotas.”
The second contribution, the Pope said, was to “help recover the sense of belonging to a community” and to challenge a false notion of freedom as the “right to be left alone, free from all bonds”.
Students oust pro-life president
Students at an Irish university associated with Blessed John Henry Newman have voted to remove their pro-life union president.
Katie Ascough stopped the union at University College Dublin from publishing information on abortion pills and the cost of abortion abroad. She had said such advice was illegal and could provoke criminal proceedings. The university originated as the Catholic University of Ireland, where Newman was the first rector.
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