Monthly Archives: October 2014

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.

CNA News reports:

In another blast at those in the Church hierarchy looking for ways to give Holy Communion to people in second marriages, Head of the CDF Cardinal Muller said:

“We can ‘deconstruct’ the Gospel and Tradition and remake them to the liking of today’s world, making their demands easy and accommodating them to the fragile, superficial, immature and post-modern man.”

The cardinal also defended the family:

“The family should be firmly defended as the place and environment in which each person is filled with love and grows in his or efforts and willingness to sacrifice,” he said.

“The duality between man and woman is necessary for the constitution of a marriage and a family, and no child should be deprived of his natural right to have a father and a mother.”