Magister writes:
Readers of Sarah’s book have sent him many comments, favorable and unfavorable. And in the dossier that is about to come out in “L'Homme Nouveau,” the cardinal responds to a good number of the objections he has received.
But it is precisely what these objections reveal that has convinced Cardinal Sarah even more that the serious case of the Church today is none other than a crisis of faith. A crisis that lies beneath the questions debated at the synod, because it touches the very foundations of the Catholic faith and brings out into the open a widespread illiteracy concerning the age-old teaching of the Church, present even among the clergy, precisely those who are supposed to act as guides for the faithful.
There we have it: the Synodal crisis stems from a crisis of Faith. The new "pastoral" orientations have their genesis in a defective, un-Catholic belief system. It is not Catholic, not Christian. Magister writes:
“The entire Church has always firmly held that one may not receive communion with the knowledge of being in a state of mortal sin, a principle recalled as definitive by John Paul II in his 2003 encyclical ‘Ecclesia de Eucharistia,’” on the basis of what was decreed by the Council of Trent.
And immediately afterward he adds:
“Not even a pope can dispense from such a divine law.”
Cardinal Sarah with Bishop Athanasius Schneider
It is heresy! Any change in the teaching is pure, unadulterated heresy - a "Christological heresy" - in the words of Gerhard Cardinal Muller. Let there be no mistake: if any change is undertaken on trying to change the divine law, the perpetrators will be heretics, and will be denounced as such.
The gravity of the situation is fed by - let us be honest - the Pope's continued silence over the explosion of open heresy at the Synod. This cannot be understated. At the Synod - yes - we had marvelous demonstrations of Faith and fidelity - but we also had manifestations of horrible infidelity and treachery. Not one of these men were silenced, expelled from Rome, removed from office by the Pope. These heresiarchs still have their sees, pouring spiritual poison into the souls of the faithful. How is this possible? It is possible because the crisis comes right from the top: from the Pope.
Let us return to the words of the great African Cardinal:
To conclude, I feel wounded in my heart as a bishop in witnessing such incomprehension of the Church’s definitive teaching on the part of my brother priests.
I cannot allow myself to imagine as the cause of such confusion anything but the insufficiency of the formation of my confreres. And insofar as I am responsible for the discipline of the sacraments in the whole Latin Church, I am bound in conscience to recall that Christ has reestablished the Creator’s original plan of a monogamous, indissoluble marriage ordered to the good of the spouses, as also to the generation and education of children. He has also elevated marriage between baptized persons to the rank of a sacrament, signifying God’s covenant with his people, just like the Eucharist.
In spite of this, there also exists a marriage that the Church calls “legitimate.” The sacred dimension of this “natural” dimension makes it an element awaiting the sacrament, on the condition that it respect heterosexuality and the parity of the two spouses when it comes to their specific rights and duties, and that the consent not exclude monogamy, indissolubility, permanence, and openness to life.
Conversely, the Church stigmatizes the deformations introduced into human love: homosexuality, polygamy, chauvinism, free love, divorce, contraception, etc. In any case, it never condemns persons. But it does not leave them in their sin. Like its Master, it has the courage and the charity to say to them: go and from now on sin no more.
The Church does not only welcome with mercy, respect, and delicacy. It firmly invites to conversion. As its follower, I promote mercy for sinners - which all of us are - but also firmness toward sins incompatible with the love for God that is professed with sacramental communion. What is this if not the imitation of the attitude of the Son of God who addresses the adulterous woman: “Neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on sin no more” (Jn 8:11)?
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