By Modesto P. Sa-onoy
As I was about to continue the subject of this series of columns last Saturday, I received a timely message from LifeSiteNews which is highly relevant to our topic. While the issue is Germany where the Church is undergoing a crisis that can lead to heresy, apostasy and schisms as feared by Cardinal Müller, the situation there will have a ripple effect in the Catholic Church and definitely in the Philippines.
This is among the reports that keep us wondering or confused about where the Catholic Church is going. It is, however, a way for us to be conscious as a member of the Mystical Body of Christ.
On March 15th, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that the Catholic Church cannot bless homosexual relationships, calling such blessings “illicit.” Indeed this has been a prohibited practice for centuries, starting even with the Jewish law.
But, since that announcement, several hundred German priests have vowed to violate the Vatican’s directive, and many already have done so. A recent photo of a German priest doing this exactly has been shown worldwide.
The Vatican policy reasonably states that it is “not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.”
We had our situation here with more than this when a priest in a town in Western Visayas married two homosexual but the Church kicked out that priest, as it should be to make clear the doctrine of the Church. Since then I have not heard of any Filipino priest defying the Church. The Church had to be firm or it makes its doctrine “adjustable” to the so-called “reality of the time.”
The fundamental reason for this, of course, is that God “does not and cannot bless sin,” the Vatican says.
The report, however, said, many faithful German Catholics are prayerfully protesting at these renegade parishes, reciting the Holy Rosary and saying other prayers as loving acts of reparation for the illicit ‘blessings’.”
These illicit “blessings” are only symptomatic of the head-long plunge of the German Catholic Church into what has been called “massive apostasy,” and undeclared “schism.”
Observers have suggested that this pernicious deviation from the Church’s teaching on marriage and on sexual morality by the German Catholic clergy was set in motion by the so-called German Synodal Path – a Church convention run by the German bishops which dissents from Catholic teaching on celibacy, clerical authority, the ban on female ordination, contraception, cohabitation, homosexuality, and gender theory.”
The report also said there are “many attempts made in the last year to appeal to Church authorities, both within and outside Germany, to stop the Synodal Path’s maneuvering against the constant teaching of the Magesterium in faith and morals.”
Magisterium is the teaching authority of the Church that ought to be unified but the Synodal Path is a concept of giving wider latitude of authority to national conferences of bishops. So far these national conferences, like our Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, had been granted certain levels of authority or indult to make decisions on their level.
The national synods are not to veer away from the doctrine of the Church lest there will be “national churches” doing their thing. That will splinter the Church in many dangerous situations that can lead to schisms.
Last month there was a report of “a group of faithful Catholic clergy – including a Cardinal, bishops and priests who have approached the Pope asking him to intervene to stop the Catholic Church in Germany from crossing into undeclared schism.”
But so far there is no news that the Pope had intervened. He must if he wants to prevent another schism that created Protestantism which began in Germany in 1517. It would seem that German Catholic leaders will repeat their departure from the Catholic Church as their ancestors did 500 years ago. There are many who are waiting for what happens in Germany,
Continued tomorrow.
