IMAGE: CNS photo/Paul Haring
By Carol Glatz
ABOARD THE PAPAL FLIGHT FROM GENEVA (CNS) — The question
of allowing Protestants married to Catholics to receive Communion at Mass in
special cases has to be decided by each individual bishop and cannot be decided
by a bishops’ conference, Pope Francis told reporters after a one-day
ecumenical journey to Geneva.
During an inflight news conference June 21, the pope was
asked about his recent decision requesting the Catholic bishops’ conference of
Germany not publish nationwide guidelines for allowing Communion for such
couples.
He said the guidelines went beyond what is foreseen by
the Code of Canon law “and there is the problem.” The code does not
provide for nationwide policies, he said, but “provides for the bishop of
the diocese (to make a decision on each case), not the bishops’
conference.”
“This was the difficulty of the debate. Not the
content,” he said.
Cardinal-designate Luis Ladaria, prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had written the bishops that
“the Holy Father has reached the conclusion that the document has not
matured enough to be published.”
Pope Francis expanded on that by saying it will have to
be studied more. He said he believed what could be done is an
“illustrative” type of document “so that each diocesan bishop
could oversee what the Code of Canon Law permits. There was no stepping on the
brakes,” he said.
The bishops’ conference can study the issue and offer
guidelines that help each bishop handle each individual case, he said.
MORE TO COME
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