Cardinal against Cardinal

Some Catholics appear to be worried, up in arms about reports on the discussions between Cardinals over the question of admitting divorced and remarried persons to Holy Communion. In an interview recently, Cardinal Burke said that he hopes Cardinal Kasper will correct his 'error' on the matter.

There is still time.

These are discussions - not decrees. The Synod hasn't even started yet.  The official discussions and debates haven't even taken place yet.  Lay people are paying way too much attention to the media reports, the interviews, the 'leaks' - and they are creating a furor over rumor and gossip.

Journalists are paid to write about this stuff, as John Allen does here:

It’s cardinal vs. cardinal, round two, on the issue of allowing Catholics who divorce and remarry without an annulment -- a declaration from a church court that their first marriage was invalid -- to receive the sacraments.

Round one came in January, when Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, coordinator of Pope Francis’s “G8” council of cardinal advisers, took on German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the pope’s doctrinal czar.

Müller had published a piece in the Vatican newspaper seeming to close the door to any change, prompting Rodriguez Maradiaga to take him to task in an interview with a German newspaper.

“I say, my brother, the world isn’t like this, and you should be a little flexible when you hear other voices,” the Honduran prelate said.

Now, we have more crossfire between two princes of the church, though in this case the testy public rebuke is coming from someone who upholds the traditional discipline: Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna, widely seen as a strong conservative and one of the late John Paul II’s key advisers on bioethics and marriage and family issues.

Caffarra gave a lengthy interview this week to the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, in which he was asked to respond to a speech given by German Cardinal Walter Kasper during a recent two-day session for all the world’s cardinals with Pope Francis. In that speech, which he called an “overture,” Kasper floated the idea of readmitting the divorced and remarried to communion after a period of penance.

Asked about that idea, Caffarra bluntly said it fails to answer a “very simple” question: What about their first marriage? - Boston Globe

Read it.  Think about it.  But wait for the Synod to start, and then wait for it to be completed.  Wait for the decree which results to be promulgated, rather than speculate on what could happen.  Quit scaring people and causing trouble.

In the meantime pray.

And pay attention to what the Pope actually says:

In extemporaneous remarks to members of Carollo, an Italian association of broadcasters, Pope Francis said that the “sins of the media” are misinformation, calumny, and defamation. The last two, he said, “are grave, but not as dangerous as the first.”

The Pope said that calumny (which involves falsehoods) “is a mortal sin” and defamation (which involves truths that unjustly damage a person’s reputation) “is a mortal sin." - CWN