Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who has just been appointed to a six-year term as president of the nation’s episcopal conference, told German bishops that the Gospel account of the woman caught in adultery (Jn. 7:53-8:1) should be applied to discussions of divorce and remarriage.
Marx said rigorists in the early Church used to say there was no absolution for adultery. This attitude ran against the practice adopted by Jesus, he said, adding that: “all are sinners like the woman, all need forgiveness”. He said Jesus forgave the woman and restored her dignity before God. For the cardinal, Jesus’s example of mercy is important in the Church’s discussion of divorce and remarriage, especially as applied to confession, which is intended to offer sinners forgiveness and to save people from “the sentence of God” and “also from social death”.
On the other hand, Marx said Jesus’ forgiveness of the woman is not a call to laxism – a reference to Christ’s words: “Go, and sin no more” – but a “call to a new life”.
‘Paying price for belief’
David Alton, a member of the House of Lords, said: “Barely a day passes without reports of some new atrocity committed against Christians. The West, including some Christian leaders, seem to be in a state of complete denial about the existence of religiously motivated persecution in countries like Nigeria or Syria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan, Iran, Egypt, China and North Korea.
“Unless we lay bare the ideology which lies behind radical Islamist thinking – and which too often reduces God to the status of a faction leader or tribal chief – and challenge the conspiracy of silence which surrounds the question of religious persecution, at the hands of radical Islamists and atheists alike – we will sleep-walk into a tragedy which has implications well beyond the ancient biblical lands or east Asia.”
Swiss bishops criticise surrogate motherhood
The Swiss government’s proposal to legalise surrogate motherhood has been strongly criticised by the bioethics commission of the Swiss bishops’ conference. Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman carries and delivers a child for another couple or person. It condemned the practice, describing it as an “expression of the liberal individualist view of society”.
The commission said surrogate motherhood violates the dignity of the child, “who is condemned to develop in a strange womb”, as well as the dignity of the woman, “who sells her body”. The position of the Swiss bishops was based on The Gift of Life (Donum Vitae), a 1987 document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Haitian cardinal helps solve political crisis
Cardinal Chibly Langlois, Haiti’s first ever cardinal, who was elevated to the post only last month, has succeeded in brokering an agreement between the nation’s President and Opposition forces that will allow for legislative elections in October.
The Fides news agency reported that Cardinal Chibly said the Church accompanies political actors to be able to build dialogue between all parties and solve the problems of society. He added that “we must share the responsibility of resolving the political situation and the crisis that our country is experiencing, and this can only be achieved through dialogue”.
The holding of elections had been suspended for two years by President Michel Martelly. The stalemate that had been reached during negotiations between the different parties has now been solved following the cardinal’s mediation.
(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)