Rorate Caeli: Sandro Magister, the respected Vatican correspondent for the Italian paper ‘L’Espresso’, recently published an article with the shock title; ‘When the Church of Rome Forgave Second Marriages’. Magister describes the current push to abandon the discipline of the Church and permit those who have been divorced and civilly remarried to receive communion in Catholic churches. The justification of his title is his claim that new historical research has demonstrated that this practice was approved of in the early Church. Here is the key section of his article:
‘The proponents of the change, when they make their position explicit, ultimately rely on the conviction of the individual conscience. But is conscience the only means of solving the problem of the divorced and remarried? According to what happened during the first centuries of Christianity, it is not. Back then there was another solution. Attention to how the Church of the first centuries addressed the question of the divorced and remarried has been called back recently by a priest of Genoa, Giovanni Cereti, a scholar of patristics and ecumenism. …” Read full article here.
