India’s top court: Instant divorce among Muslims unlawful | Religion News Service

NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday (Aug. 22) struck down the Muslim practice that allows men to instantly divorce their wives as unconstitutional.

The bench, comprising five senior judges of different faiths, deliberated for three months before issuing its order in response to petitions from seven Muslim women who had been divorced through the practice known as triple talaq.

Indian law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on NDTV that since the court deemed the practice unconstitutional there is no need for any further legislative action by the government.

Full report: Religion News Service

Intense jockeying on gay issues precedes next week’s Catholic synod meeting – The Washington Post

But for many gay Catholics, the first synod on the family held last year ended in disappointment. A working document released midway through the three-week conference suggested that the church adopt a more open approach, but the final report toned that language down. Francis insisted the issue be included for future debate, however, and many bishops at the synod are on record calling for more openness to gays and lesbians. A lot has happened in the LGBT debate globally in the past year. Ireland, a predomin

Source: Intense jockeying on gay issues precedes next week’s Catholic synod meeting – The Washington Post

Papal nuncio warns Catholics against becoming ‘caricatures’

 

Pope Francis has warned in the past against the Church becoming too fixated on the issues of contraception, gay marriage and abortion (matters which, as a matter of simple fact, occupy a relatively low level of importance in the hierarchy of Catholic doctrine). Speaking to the theme of the need for more vocations to the priesthood, the papal nuncio to Ireland has repeated the same theme, saying in a striking image, that such obsessions present to the world a “caricature” of what Catholicism is really all about.

 

 

 

 

 

He also warned Catholics against becoming caricatures through a seeming preoccupation with abortion, gay marriage and contraception.

He said the moral teaching of the church had to be seen in the context of Christian life in general and “we need to avoid the caricature that the only thing the Catholic Church has to speak about is abortion, gay marriage and contraception”.

He said “the caricature would be that these Catholics, all they talk about are those three things, and we don’t want to put ourselves in that situation because the beauty of life with Christ, the spirituality of the Catholic Church, the history of the Catholic Church, the life of grace, the aspiration to be found worthy of the life of the world to come, eternal life, that is what this is about.”

Relations between Ireland and the Vatican have ‘improved immensely’

Source: Papal nuncio warns Catholics against becoming ‘caricatures’

Church must adjust to reality of co-habitation, divorce and remarriage, says cardinal

A few years ago, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn hit the headlines, saying that at a time when so many people are not bothering to get married,  the Church should reconsider its approach to divorced people who do want to remarry. At the same time, he said that it was time to shift the emphasis, in responding to gay couples, from an obsession with genital acts, to consideration of the quality of the relationships. On both counts, he was ahead of the pack – and remains so. Speaking about the response of Austrican Catholics to the global survey in preparation for the synod, he has now said that the Church must adjust to the reality of co-habitation, divorce and remarriage, To which LGBT Catholics would add, and to the reality of same – sex couples – and if the “Church” should adapt, then so too should Catholic schools.

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Gay Catholic Andrew Sullivan: Same-sex marriage in line with Christianity – Washington Times

Andrew Sullivan, noted gay commentator and self-professed practicing Catholic, said on a Sunday news talk show that same-sex marriage is in line with his religious faith.

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Giving rights to lesbian, gays, bisexual and transgendered is not a violation of biblical principles, he said on CNN. And if Christians can live with divorce, they can live with same-sex marriage, he suggested.

“I would say the religious arguments are more based in fear than in the actual teachings, that they’re based upon stray texts that actually don’t mean what you think they mean and that Jesus himself only said one thing about marriage — which is that you can’t divorce,” Mr. Sullivan said, Raw Story reported. “And we live in a country where countless people are divorced, and that doesn’t seem to threaten the religious liberty of Catholics, and it’s as fundamental an issue.”

Mr. Sullivan said most Catholics — despite church teachings — were actually OK with gay marriage, out of compassion and out of awareness that all fall short of the glory of God.

“So if Catholics can live with religious liberty with divorced people, they should be perfectly able to live with gay people, I mean, as married, as a civil marriage,” he said, Raw Story reported.

via Gay Catholic Andrew Sullivan: Same-sex marriage in line with Christianity – Washington Times.

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Priests defy Rome over Communion for remarried divorcees.

One hundred and forty priests from the archdiocese of Freiburg announced yesterday that they have signed a memorandum in which they admit to publicly allowing remarried divorcees to receive Communion.

“In our parishes remarried divorcees go to Communion, receive absolution in the sacrament of reconciliation and receive the last rites with our specific permission,” say the priests, who represent around a seventh of Freiburg’s clerics.

They add that they are allowing themselves “to be led by mercy in our pastoral work with remarried divorcees, and we hope that a decision will soon be arrived at which will give these people an official, Gospel-based place in our Church in which they are not discriminated against.”

They say they are allowing remarried divorcees to be catechists, members of parish councils, and to perform other roles in their parishes.

via The Tablet 

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