Cardinal Piacenza: “A mercy without truth is not Christian”

19 February 2015

Mauro Cardinal Piacenza, Prefect of the Major Penitentiary, has spoken out strongly against the admission to Holy Communion of divorced persons who have entered an invalid civil union.

Lifesitenews.com carries a full report of Cardinal Piacenza’s comments:

ROME, February 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Mercy and truth can never be separated, and certainly never placed in opposition to each other, Vatican Cardinal Mauro Piacenza stressed in an address last month to an audience of priests in Germany.

As numerous Church leaders press for changes in the Church’s discipline regarding the distribution of Communion, the cardinal refuted the notion that Catholic moral teachings must be ignored in order for the Church to dispense “mercy.”

Cardinal Piacenza, who serves as head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, one of the Church’s three highest courts, said, “When in Christianity mercy and truth are presented as antagonistic, or at least as contradictory, it is always the result of a partial perception.”

“It is hardly conceivable that there could be such a strong emphasis on mercy to the detriment of truth. Or, its opposite, a strong emphasis on truth to the detriment of mercy.”

The cardinal denied the proposal, put forward by Cardinal Walter Kasper and his followers at the Synod of Bishops in October, that there can be an “artificial opposition between doctrine and pastoral activity.”

“In Christianity,” he said, “mercy and truth are co inherent, inseparable, so much so as to be not properly distinguishable.” Mercy and truth, he said, “are united without confusion, and are distinct without separation. … A mercy without truth is not Christian, and at the same time truth without mercy is not Christian.”

“Each instance in which pastoral activity is contraposed to doctrine – a pastoral activity that is full of mercy in opposition to doctrine fraught with a truth that is cold and unmerciful – we reveal ourselves as prisoners of a pre-Christian framework, in which truth and the radical newness of the Word-made-man [Christ] are not yet sufficiently and adequately integrated.” 

Continue reading at Lifesitenews.com.