SECTION I:
The Cardinal also asserts that “in recent decades,” the Church has become “too doctrinalistic and juridically minded” and needs to focus more on mercy.
Mercy is the blunted sword of justice. This sword belongs to God, not man.
God is a merciful God, but the sword of justice is not blunted for those with hardened hearts. On the mountainside, Christ said: "Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy." [3], [4] The opposite could be this: Woe to those with hardened hearts, for they will be shown justice without mercy. The sword of justice blunts and stops when it approaches a person whose heart bleeds with love, compassion and mercy but stays sharp and pierces through the one who has a heart of stone.
Kasper seems to want to command the sword of justice to be blunt at all times because to him, the hardness of the heart is relative to the facts and circumstances surrounding it, forming an area of gray with no absolutes, so that even the words of Christ can be argued, negotiated and rationalized to conform to his secular brand of ideology.
However, that is not the way the Catholic Church works. The Church exists because of and for Christ; it was established to lead people to the teachings of Christ--at no time did it "in recent decades" gradually "become too doctrinalistic and juridically minded" except in Kasper's secular and heretical thoughts.
SECTION II:
In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Kasper compared Jesus’ words on marriage to the Genesis account of the creation of the world, accusing those who take Jesus’ words on marriage and adultery at face value of “fundamentalism,” like those who still believe the world was created in six days.
...
“God created the world in six days, but no one takes that literally today. Of course the teaching that marriage cannot be dissolved is clear, but already in the New Testament Jesus’ commandment is adapted to certain situations.”
“In Matthew there is the ‘porneia’ clause about illicit unions, or adultery, which can justify divorce. There is also an exception in the first letter to the Corinthians, and Paul speaks with apostolic authority. In the first communities there are different practices and flexibility,” he said.
That is more than just one can of worms that Kasper opened.
From the first opened can crawled out an implication that at least part of the Holy Bible is not to be believed. If Genesis 1 is not reliable, then can anything else that come after be believed? Does God even exist? Perhaps not in Kasper's mind even though the hypocrite has based his career on God's existence. For his sake, he had better be right so that mercy is the only action Christ will be limited to on Judgment Day, as if Kasper even believes in such a day.
Another thing that crawled out of the first can is Kasper's condescending attitude toward those who still "cling" to their Bible (borrowing an Obamanian word) and who, having deep and unyielding faith, believe fundamentally every word in it.
If, according to Kasper, the world was not created in six days, then how many days, months, years or centuries did it take God to create it? Kasper did not say, and if he did say, how scientifically certain is he of that period? But then if Kasper is an atheist, then he had already answered the question by not answering it, implying that there is no God, no creationism, no Immaculate Conception, no Virgin Birth, no Son of God, no miracles, no resurrection and no ascension of Christ, and everything the Son of God had said can be reinterpreted by man and bent to fit neatly into a Godless Kasperian ideology.
Without Christ, there is no need for Kasper to refer to Matthew or the Letters to the Corinthians in the Bible. If Genesis cannot be relied upon, then neither can Matthew nor Corinthians that follow be relied upon for the same Kasperian reasons, whatever they may be. By citing Matthew and Corinthians as authority to argue his point, Kasper who represents the Church is himself being "doctrinalistic and juridically minded," but that ought to be expected from an unrepentant hypocrite.
Be that as it may, Kasper is still a cardinal, and whatever he says carries weight. Whether that dead weight he himself hung around his neck is too heavy for Heaven and too impenetrable for the blunted sword of mercy to shatter is a separate topic unrelated to the second can of worms he opened with his mouth.
What crawled out from this second can is a Greek word "porneia" but Kasper failed to mention "[t]he more usual word for adultery [which] is 'moicheia'" [5], quoted from an article entitled The Divorce ‘Exception’ Clauses in Matthew’s Gospel by Julian Freeman. It is a scholarly treatise on the subject of divorce, complete with footnotes, 102 of them.
Without delving into the intricacies of the arguments presented by the scholars in Julian Freeman's treatise, this blogger refers only to this passage in the Gospel of Mark quoted below without paragraph numbers and footnotes [6]:
Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
“What did Moses command you?” he replied.
They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”
“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
These words of Christ cannot be more direct or clear. They had nullified the law of Moses on divorce, and there can be no man, not Kasper, not Matthew, the Apostle, or Paul, who can say that there is a divorce exception to a marriage joined by God.
Furthermore, for Kasper to imply that divorce has Paul's approval in Corinthians by claiming that "[i]n the first communities there are different practices and flexibility" is to deceive intentionally, which is what Satan does. Can Kasper possibly be doing the work of Satan?
SECTION III:
With regard to the reception of Communion, Kasper emphasizes the fact that the Eucharist isn’t for the perfect. “Every time we celebrate Mass we say: for the remission of sins,” he said. “The Eucharist is for sinners, which we all are.”
Indeed everybody is a sinner, but is the Eucharist for every sinner, including those baptized Catholics who do not believe in God earnestly, who keep living with their hardened hearts without repentance, who do not show any sign of humility before God, who sin without compunction and who find no need to seek God's forgiveness, even as they recite the Act of Contrition [7], the Apostle's Creed [8], the Nicene Creed [9] and the Confiteor [10], all the while without paying attention to and reflecting upon the words in the prayers and without believing that the Eucharist truly heals?
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/10/02/cardinal-kasper-gears-vatican-synod-born-gay/
[2] It is probably good to remind readers of this blog that it not written by a theologian or a scholar, as if that is not already painfully obvious, and whatever that is posted is either an opinion, a speculation or an imagination.
[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205:1-12
[4] https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Matthew%205%3A7
[5] http://julianfreeman.ca/articles/divorce-exception-clauses-matthews-gospel
[6] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+10%3A1-9&version=NIV
[7] http://www.catholictradition.org/prayers1.htm
[8] Ibid.
[9] http://www.stfrancisnyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Translation-comparisons.pdf
[10] Ibid.
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