These heathens and the things they say about FrancisMercy!
Why is the Register’s Marge Fenelon so angry?
I saw the headlines and went ballistic.
“Pope Francis Seeks Easier Way for Catholics to End Marriages”
“Pope Francis Simplifies Marriage Annulments with New Fast-track Process”
There were others as bad and these. They are all grossly misleading.
There is nothing easy about ending a marriage and there is no fast-track to annulment. Not even with the Apostolic Letters motu proprio, or “on his own impulse” just issued by Pope Francis.
Why do secularists and non-Catholics have to be the ones to tell the truth about our Church? An annulment today is a ‘way to end a marriage’ yet still be considered ‘in union’ with the Church. That’s it. They just ‘say’ it’s a declaration of nullity. I suppose that they are right about that every 1/10,000th of the time, though.
You must ask yourself. Were the bishops wrong in rarely finding nullity for thousands of years up until your grandparents’ day, or are they wrong now? They can’t be both.
How can you go to the peripheries, be ecumenical, and walk together with your fellow ‘Christian’ wherever you’re supposed to be going if you keep accusing your ‘brother in Christ’ of lying when he simply reports the truth. Francis is trying to simplify annulment proceedings by removing steps and participants, and ‘fast-tracking’ several types of situations. That’s why he thinks it’s merciful, because they’re faster and cheaper. ‘Catholics’ can be free to abandon their spouses or cheat on them more quickly and the Church will ‘mercifully’ condone it within 45 days. The mercy part is where you get out of the marriage faster.
Am I saying something heretical here? Is honesty now a sin? Is blindness Catholic?
In general, both letters lessen the time and cost required for annulments. They also allow the local bishop to judge annulment cases himself or to delegate the responsibility to a priest-judge with two assistants in places where the normally required three-judge tribunal isn’t available. That’s not so much the case in the United States, but it’s not uncommon in other countries.
‘Less time and cost,’ fast and cheap, ‘fasttrack.’
Neither document in any way questions the indissolubility of marriage, nor do they offer a free ticket for those wanting to take the A Train out of it.
I suppose we should be grateful that Pope Francis didn’t include in his letter that marriages are now dissoluble. It would be so much worse if he decided just to call every broken marriage a non-marriage automatically, then on top of that add a note saying divorce is OK. It makes me feel so relieved to hear that, because of some inane technicality, I never was married all those years, but at least I’m not divorced like a Protestant!
“What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” (But if you want to pretend that God never joined them together in the first place, that’s entirely up to you.)
It’s like robbing a bank then saying it wasn’t really a bank anyway and there was no money in it. If Pope Francis called that mercy, you’d probably scold the entire world about how he never said once that banks weren’t banks. You’d go “ballistic.”
Marge, if you get married in the Church, take the marriage prep, gather the family around, have four kids and live together twenty years, then complain you didn’t know what you were doing and your husband was mean and neglectful, you can call it whatever you like, but you’ve got that train ticket out, no problem. Lying about it sets a bad example. It makes people think the Catholic Church is full of adulterous cheats, hypocrites, and brown-nosing reporters – more of a mud puddle you’d want to step over than a vast ‘ocean of mercy.’