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: Edward Peters, JD, JCD, Ref. Sig. Ap.
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: Dr. Peters has held the Edmund Cdl. Szoka
: Chair at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in
: Detroit since 2005. He earned a J. D. from
: the Univ. of Missouri at Columbia (1982) and
: a J. C. D. from the Catholic Univ. of
: America (1991). In 2010, he was appointed a
: Referendary of the Apostolic Signatura by
: Pope Benedict XVIThe Maltese disaster
: January 13, 2017
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: The bishops of Malta, in a document that can
: only be called disastrous, repeatedly
: invoking Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia, have
: directly approved divorced and remarried
: Catholics taking holy Communion provided
: they feel “at peace with God”. Unlike, say,
: the Argentine document on Amoris which, one
: could argue, left just enough room for an
: orthodox reading, however widely it also
: left the doors open for abuse by others, the
: Maltese bishops in their document come
: straight out and say it: holy Communion is
: for any Catholic who feels “at peace with
: God” and the Church’s ministers may not say
: No to such requests. In my view the Maltese
: bishops have effectively invited the
: Catholics entrusted to them (lay faithful
: and clergy alike!) to commit a number of
: objectively gravely evil acts. That their
: document was, moreover, published in
: L’Osservatore Romano, exacerbates matters
: for it deprives Vatican representatives of
: the ‘plausible deniability’ that they could
: have claimed (and might soon enough wish
: they could claim), as it becomes known that
: the Maltese bishops went beyond what even
: Amoris, if interpreted narrowly, seemed to
: permit.
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: For now, I make just a few points.
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: 1. The Maltese bishops have fallen
: completely for the canonically and
: ecclesiologically false view that an
: individual’s assessment of his or her own
: readiness to receive holy Communion (see c.
: 916) controls a minister’s decision to
: administer the sacrament (see c. 915). In
: Malta now, anyone who approaches for the
: sacraments should be recognized as being “at
: peace with God”. Objective evidence to the
: contrary is simply no longer relevant. Canon
: 916 is thus eviscerated, Canon 915 is
: effectively repudiated.
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: 2. The Maltese bishops do not seem to know
: what the word “conjugal” means. They think
: that non-married people can practice
: “conjugal” virtues and that they can decide
: about whether to engage in “conjugal” acts.
: Nonsense and, coming from bishops,
: inexcusable nonsense at that. Non-married
: people can have sex, of course, but Catholic
: pastoral integrity does not hold such sexual
: acts on par with the physically identical,
: but truly conjugal, acts as performed by
: married persons.
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: 3. The Maltese bishops, by extending their
: document to the sacrament of Reconciliation,
: have basically instructed their priests not
: to withhold absolution from
: divorced-and-remarried Catholics who refuse
: to repent of their “public and permanent
: adultery” (CCC 2384) even to the point of
: abstaining from sexual (nb: sexual not
: “conjugal”) relations. Incredibly, such a
: directive raises the specter of
: green-lighting sacrilegious confessions and
: the commission of solicitation in
: confession. No priest should want either on
: his conscience, let alone both.
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: 4. The Maltese bishops even managed to take
: swipes at Baptism and Confirmation by
: opening the door to divorced-and-remarried
: Catholics serving as godparents contrary to
: the expectations of Canon 874 § 1, 3º. See
: CLSA New Comm (2001) 1062-1063.
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: There are other serious problems with the
: Maltese document but the above should
: suffice to show why it is, quite simply, a
: disaster.
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