Author Archives: Stumblingblock

The UK Catholic Herald reports:

Speaking to the gathered bishops he said the faithful must not keep things back just because they might be worried “what will the Pope think”, according to Catholic News Service.

“Speak clearly. Don’t tell anyone, ‘you can’t say that’,” he added.

Pope Francis went on to say that “the spirit of collegiality is to speak boldly and to listen with humility” and he also welcomed the lay men and women present at the synod. “You enrich our spirit of synodality,” he told them.

U.S. Catholic/RNS news reports strong words from Cardinal Burke about Cardinal Kasper’s recent defense of his Holy Communion proposal in the press:

“I find it amazing that the cardinal claims to speak for the pope,” said Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, speaking from Rome. “The pope doesn’t have laryngitis. The pope is not mute. He can speak for himself. If this is what he wants, he will say so.”

“But for me as a cardinal to say that what I am saying are the words of Pope Francis? That to me is outrageous.”

RNS continues:

Burke also said whatever Francis thinks about a more lenient approach on Communion for remarried Catholics, the pope can’t change current church teaching because he and all bishops “are held to obedience to the truth” about marriage, and that cannot change.

The split between Anglican Bishops in the First and Third World has grown so vast that leadership is considering cancelling the Lambeth Conference in 2018 due to low attendance.

Episcopal Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said that the Archbishop of Canterbury “is not going to call a Lambeth until he is reasonably certain that the vast majority of bishops would attend.” Scores of Anglican bishops, including a heavy proportion of those from Africa, boycotted the most recent Lambeth Conference, in 2008, because of their opposition to recent decisions by the worldwide Anglican leadership to allow for female bishops, homosexual priests, and same-sex unions.

Catholic World News reports:

A spokesman for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Justin Welby, declined to comment on the report that the Lambeth Conference would be cancelled. Such a cancellation would be an unprecedented step, underlining the crisis within the Anglican communion.