{"id":5327,"date":"2015-09-09T15:25:31","date_gmt":"2015-09-09T19:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/?p=5327"},"modified":"2015-09-09T22:17:50","modified_gmt":"2015-09-10T02:17:50","slug":"fast-and-cheap-register-goes-ballistic-over-francismercy-misreporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=5327","title":{"rendered":"Fast and Cheap? &#8211; Register Goes &#8216;Ballistic&#8217; Over FrancisMercy Misreporting"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_5351\" style=\"width: 516px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/shocked-baby.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5351\" class=\"wp-image-5351 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/shocked-baby-1024x512.jpg?resize=506%2C253\" alt=\"\" width=\"506\" height=\"253\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-5351\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">These heathens and the things they say about FrancisMercy!<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Why is the Register&#8217;s Marge Fenelon so <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncregister.com\/blog\/mfenelon\/heres-what-the-annulment-changes-are-all-about?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register#When:2015-09-8%2017:42:01\" target=\"_blank\">angry<\/a>?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I saw the headlines and went ballistic.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPope Francis Seeks Easier Way for Catholics to End Marriages\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPope Francis Simplifies Marriage Annulments with New Fast-track Process\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There were others as bad and these. They are all grossly misleading.<\/p>\n<p>There is nothing easy about ending a marriage and there is no fast-track to annulment. Not even with the Apostolic Letters <em>motu proprio<\/em>, or \u201con his own impulse\u201d just issued by Pope Francis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Why do secularists and non-Catholics have to be the ones to tell the truth about our Church?\u00a0 An annulment today is a &#8216;way to end a marriage&#8217; yet still be considered &#8216;in union&#8217; with the Church.\u00a0 That&#8217;s it.\u00a0 They just &#8216;say&#8217; it&#8217;s a declaration of nullity.\u00a0 I suppose that they are right about that every 1\/10,000th of the time, though.<\/p>\n<p>You must ask yourself.\u00a0 Were the bishops wrong in rarely finding nullity for thousands of years up until your grandparents&#8217; day, or are they wrong now?\u00a0 They can&#8217;t be both.<\/p>\n<p>How can\u00a0 you go to the peripheries, be ecumenical, and walk together with your fellow &#8216;Christian&#8217; wherever you&#8217;re supposed to be going if you keep accusing your &#8216;brother in Christ&#8217; of lying when he simply reports the truth.\u00a0 Francis is trying to simplify annulment proceedings by removing steps and participants, and &#8216;fast-tracking&#8217; several types of situations.\u00a0 That&#8217;s why he thinks it&#8217;s merciful, because they&#8217;re faster and cheaper.\u00a0 &#8216;Catholics&#8217; can be free to abandon their spouses or cheat on them more quickly and the Church will &#8216;mercifully&#8217; condone it within 45 days.\u00a0 The mercy part is where you get out of the marriage faster.<\/p>\n<p>Am I saying something heretical here?\u00a0 Is honesty now a sin?\u00a0 Is blindness Catholic?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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&#8217;t available. That\u2019s not so much the case in the United States, but it\u2019s not uncommon in other countries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8216;Less time and cost,&#8217; fast and cheap, &#8216;fasttrack.&#8217;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I suppose we should be grateful that Pope Francis didn&#8217;t include in his letter that marriages are now dissoluble.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It makes me feel so relieved to hear that,\u00a0because of some inane technicality, I never was married all those years, but at least I&#8217;m not divorced like a Protestant!<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.&#8221; (But if you want to pretend that God never joined them together in the first place, that&#8217;s entirely up to you.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like robbing a bank then saying it wasn&#8217;t really a bank anyway and there was no money in it.\u00a0 If Pope Francis called that mercy, you&#8217;d probably scold the entire world about how he never said once that banks weren&#8217;t banks.\u00a0 You&#8217;d go &#8220;ballistic.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t know what you were doing and your husband was mean and neglectful, you can call it whatever you like, but you&#8217;ve got that <strong>train ticket<\/strong> <strong>out<\/strong>, no problem. Lying about it sets a bad example.\u00a0 It makes people think the Catholic Church is full of adulterous cheats, hypocrites, and brown-nosing reporters &#8211; more of a mud puddle you&#8217;d want to step over than a vast &#8216;ocean of mercy.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why is the Register&#8217;s Marge Fenelon so angry? I saw the headlines and went ballistic. \u201cPope Francis Seeks Easier Way for Catholics to End Marriages\u201d \u201cPope Francis Simplifies Marriage Annulments with New Fast-track Process\u201d There were others as bad and these. They are all grossly misleading. There is nothing easy about ending a marriage and <span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span> <span class=\"more-link-wrap\"><a href=\"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=5327\" class=\"more-link\"><span>Read More &rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[668,672,521,530,670,669,671],"class_list":["post-5327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-annulment","tag-cheap","tag-fast","tag-francis","tag-indissoluble","tag-marriage","tag-register"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5327"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5406,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5327\/revisions\/5406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}