Catholics have reason to be a bit embarrassed by the Synod of Bishops that is coughing and wheezing to a merciful finish this weekend. The meeting, meant to advise the Pope on family matters, has revealed deep divisions in the Church, divisions that are rarely held up for the whole world to see.
Besides progressive efforts to accept and regularize homosexuality, the principle issue dividing the nearly 300 bishops from around the world is whether the divorced and civilly remarried may receive communion. The Church has traditionally viewed such “irregular” relationships as adulterous if the first marriage is also considered valid.
German bishops are leading the charge to change the practice of the Church with the Africans seeming to take the lead in opposing such a change. The U.S. delegation of bishops tend to side with the Africans.
One of the more dramatic speeches to the Synod came from a Romanian doctor who made a plea not to fiddle with either the doctrine of the practice of communion.
Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea told the remarkable story of her parents who had to wait 17 years to marry because her father was jailed by the communists before their marriage could take place. “My mother waited all those years for my father, although she didn’t even know if he was still alive.”
She said her parents’ example “shows that God’s grace can overcome terrible social circumstances and material poverty. Material poverty and consumerism are not the primary cause of the family crisis. The primary cause of the sexual and cultural revolution is ideological.”
The doctor, who is president of the Catholic doctors association of Romania, pointed first to violent communism that took the lives of millions that has been supplanted by cultural Marxism created by Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School who were progenitors of “gay rights and gender ideology.”
Classical Marxism attempted to remake society by the take-over of private property, cultural Marxism “goes deeper; it pretends to redefine family, sexual identity and human nature.” She told the Bishops “this ideology [which] calls itself progressive..is nothing else than the serpent’s offer for man to take control, to replace God, to arrange salvation, in this world.”
She called upon the Catholic Bishops to fight back as many of her country’s Bishops did during the Cold War and to warn their flocks “against this danger.”
Copies of her speech went viral through the Catholic world.
Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse
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