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Divorced Catholics should look elsewhere for God’s mercy, somewhere other than the Eucharist, the Head of the Vatican’s council for family, Cardinal Ennio Antonelli told a conference for Latin American bishops.
The Catholic Church welcomes those who are divorced and remarried, but, “mercy is inseparable from the truth,” he said.
“Those who are divorced and have entered into a new union cannot be admitted to the Eucharist and to sacramental absolution as long as they remain in a state of objective contradiction of the demands of Christian marriage,” Antonelli explained.
The Church is with them and encourages them to “remain humble, to pray to understand and follow ever more the will of God,” the cardinal said.
He added that they should also commit to doing good works, reflect on the “meaning of moral norms” and always trust “in the infinite mercy of God.”
This non-Eucharistic holiness will make them “more merciful toward Christians who are living inconsistently, toward those who are indifferent, those who are combative toward the Church, those who destroy or do not establish authentic family bonds, those who promote ideologies and laws that are contrary to family and to life, those who are violent and those who take advantage of the poor.”
“Obviously” he said, “What we want and desire is their well-being. God has sent us, as he sent Jesus, not to ‘condemn the world, but to save it’.”
As bishops, the cardinal told them, “Our duty is to lead our ministries to awaken the abundance of energy that is more or less dormant in the body of the Church.”
“What should concern us most, as Leo XIII said, is not the strength of those who are evil, but the inertia of those who are good.”
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