On visit to France, he says 'irregular unions' of remarriage outside church can't be recognized.
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
LOURDES, FRANCE–Pope Benedict said yesterday the Roman Catholic Church could not recognize "irregular unions" of Catholics who divorce and remarry outside the church.
"Initiatives aimed at blessing irregular unions cannot be admitted," he said in an address to French bishops in the shrine city of Lourdes.
Throughout the developed world, the church has been struggling with how to administer to Catholics who have divorced and remarried without an annulment – an ecclesiastical declaration that their first union is null and void – but want to remain fully active in the church.
The church does not recognize divorce. It considers the first marriage still valid and teaches that those who divorce and remarry cannot receive communion unless they abstain from sexual relations with their new partner.
While bishops in several countries have been pushing for some opening on the difficult issue, the 81-year-old Pope said the church could not change its teachings on the indissolubility of marriage because it was instituted by Christ.
In other remarks, the Pope ordered bishops to make space for traditionalists who use the Latin mass. A papal decision last year to allow a much wider use of the old-style mass – a move that traditionalists demanded for decades but which was opposed by liberals – has met with resistance in some countries, particularly France.
"Everyone has a place in the church. Every person, without exception, should be able to feel at home and never rejected," the Pope said, referring to those who preferred the Latin mass instead of the new liturgy in modern languages introduced after the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965.
On a pilgrimage yesterday morning to the shrine where the faithful believe the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl 150 years ago, the Pope told a crowd love can be stronger than all the evil in the world. He said a mass for nearly 200,000 people near the sanctuary built over the spot of the apparitions.
Pilgrims flocked from dozens of countries for the Pope's three-day visit, his first to France. Many were in wheelchairs or stretchers.
When he arrived on Saturday night, Benedict prayed in the grotto where Bernadette Soubirous said the Madonna appeared and spoke to her 18 times, and he drank water from a spring that believers say has healing powers.
Pope warns against laity performing functions of priests
LARA MARLOWE in Lourdes
FRANCE: POPE BENEDICT XVI yesterday spoke out against lay people performing the functions of priests, writes Lara Marlowe in Lourdes
"Priests are a gift from God for the church," the pontiff told French bishops.
"Where their specific missions are concerned, priests cannot delegate their functions to the faithful," the pope said.
The problem of priestly vocations is especially acute in France, where one northern diocese has only one priest to serve 27 parishes. As David Rice, a former Dominican priest, wrote in this newspaper in July 2008: "In essence the lay people have taken over the local church and run it for themselves."
The pope also spoke of his concern at the deteriorating institutions of marriage and the family, which he described as "today experiencing real turbulence".
The pontiff singled out those who are divorced and remarried, saying: "The church, which cannot oppose the will of Christ, firmly maintains the principle of the indissolubility of marriage . . . Hence initiatives aimed at blessing irregular unions cannot be admitted."
On Saturday, the pope warned 260,000 worshippers in Paris to "shun the worship of idols". Our modern world has created its own idols, he said. "St Paul explains to the Colossians that insatiable greed is a form of idolatry, and he reminds his disciple Timothy that love of money is the root of all evil."
After the candledlit procession in Lourdes on Saturday night, Pope Benedict recounted how 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous "saw a light, and in this light she saw a young lady who was beautiful, more beautiful than any other . . . Lourdes is one of the places chosen by God for his beauty to be reflected with particular brightness, hence the importance here of the symbol of light."
The pope dedicated his homily yesterday to the cross. "The instrument of torture which, on Good Friday, manifested God's judgment on the world, has become a source of life, pardon, mercy, a sign of reconciliation and peace," he said.
In his autobiography, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote: "I am convinced that the crisis of the church which we are living through today was largely caused by the disintegration of the liturgy."
The pope's preference for traditional liturgy was obvious this weekend. He has replaced the 1960s silver papal pastoral staff with a gold Greek cross dating back to the mid-19th century.
He asked that communion wafers consecrated for his visit be stored in ciboriums of precious metal, not earthenware, as had become the custom.
© 2008 The Irish Times
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times
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