(by Roberto de Mattei IL FOGLIO October 20, 2015)


On October 17th 2015, Pope Francis announced how the Synod on the Family is going to conclude. Just a few days before the end of the work by the assembly of bishops, they have reached an impasse, and the way out of it, according to the Pope would be the decentralization of the Church.


This impasse is due to the division among those in the hall, who refer with firmness to the perennial Magisterium on marriage and those “innovators” who want to overturn two thousand years of Church teaching, but above all – the Truth of the Gospel. It is, in fact, the Word of Christ, the natural and Divine law, that a valid marriage – celebrated and consummated [ratum et consummatum] – by the baptized, cannot, under any circumstances, be dissolved by anyone.


A single exception [to this] would annul the absolute, universal value of this law and if it were to fall, the entire moral edifice of the Church would collapse. Marriage is either indissoluble or it isn’t and a disassociation between the principle and its practical application cannot be admitted. Between thoughts and words and between words and facts, the Church insists on a radical coherence, the coherence the Martyrs have borne witness to throughout history.


The principle that doctrine doesn’t change, but its pastoral application does, introduces a wedge between two inseparable dimensions of Christianity: the Truth and Life. The separation of doctrine and praxis is not of Catholic doctrine, but of Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, which turns upside down the traditional axiom according to which agere sequitur esse. Action, in the perspective of the innovators, precedes being and conditions it; experience does not live the truth but creates it.


Read the rest at: http://www.robertodemattei.it/en/2015/10/22/the-synod-the-decentralization-of-the-church-offends-the-faith-and-common-sense/