Cardinal about sexual ‘sins’

Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego, in an article in the Jesuit America Magazine wrote about sexual sins:

“For most of the history of the Church, various gradations of objective wrong in the evaluation of sexual sins were present in the life of the Church. But in the 17th century, with the inclusion in Catholic teaching of the declaration that for all sexual sins there is no parvity of matter (i.e., no circumstances can mitigate the grave evil of a sexual sin), we relegated the sins of sexuality to an ambit in which no other broad type of sin is so absolutely categorised. The moral tradition that all sexual sins are grave matter springs from an abstract, deductivist and truncated notion of the Christian moral life that yields a definition of sin jarringly inconsistent with the larger universe of Catholic moral teaching.”

German bishops move on

The letter that three top Vatican cardinals sent to the German bishops criticizing the setting up of a Synodal Council in Germany did not stop Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German conference of bishops, from telling reporters that they will still set up the Synodal Council this month. The German bishops told the Vatican that they would be happy to meet with Vatican officials to “clarify” the role of the new group as it develops.

Pope praying for victims

Pope Francis’ prayer intention in March is for victims of abuse. The pope said that “asking for forgiveness is necessary, but it is not enough. Asking for forgiveness is good for the victims, but they are the ones who have to be ‘at the centre’ of everything,” he continued. “Their pain and their psychological wounds can begin to heal if they find answers – if there are concrete actions to repair the horrors they have suffered and to prevent them from happening again.”

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)