Vatican City, 23 January 2015 (VIS) –
Pope Francis today received in audience the dean, prelate auditors,
officials and collaborators of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, in
order to inaugurate the legal year. In his address, the Holy Father
focused on the human and cultural context in which matrimonial intent
is formed. He emphasised that the crisis of values in society is not
a recent phenomenon, and recalled that forty years ago Pope Paul VI
had already denounced the ailments of modern man, “at times wounded
by a systematic relativism, that bends to the easiest choices of
circumstance, of demagogy, of fashion, of passion, of hedonism, of
selfishness, so that externally he attempts to dispute the mastery of
the law, and internally, almost without realising, substitutes the
empire of moral conscience with the whim of psychological
consciousness”.
The Pope highlighted the role of the
judge, who is require to perform his judicial analysis where there is
doubt regarding the validity of marriage, to ascertain whether there
was an original shortcoming in consent, either directly in terms of a
defect in the validity of intention or a grave deficit in the
understanding of marriage itself to the extent of determining will.
The crisis in marriage, indeed, not infrequently has at its root the
crisis in knowledge enlightened by faith, or rather by adhesion to
God and His plan of love realised in Jesus Christ”.
“Pastoral experience teaches us that
today there is a great number of faithful in irregular situations,
whose histories have been strongly influenced by the widespread
worldly mentality”, he continued. “There exists, indeed, a sort
of spiritual worldliness, which hides behind the appearance of piety
and even love for the Church, and which leads to the pursuit not of
the glory of God, but rather of personal well-being. One of the
consequences of this attitude is a faith hemmed in by subjectivism,
interested solely in a given experience or a series of arguments and
areas of knowledge believed to console or enlighten, but in which the
subject in reality remains imprisoned by the immanence of his or her
own reason or emotions. … Therefore, the judge, in evaluating the
validity of the consent given, must take into account the context of
values and faith”.
Pope Francis urged greater commitment
and passion in the ministry of the judge, whose role is “to protect
the unity of the jurisprudence of the Church”, and “pastoral work
for the good of many couples, and many children, who are often the
victims of these situations. Here too there is a need for pastoral
conversion on the part of ecclesiastical structures to be able to
offer the opus iustitiae to all those who turn to the Church to shed
light on their matrimonial situation. This is your difficult mission:
… do not ensnare salvation in the constrictions of legalism. The
function of law is guided towards the salus animarum on the condition
that, avoiding sophisms distant from the living flesh of people in
difficulty, it may help to establish the truth of the moment of
consent”.
The Pope stressed the importance of the
presence at every ecclesiastical Tribunal of persons competent to
offer sound advice on the possibility of initiating a suit for the
annulment of marriage. “In the hope that in every Tribunal these
figures may be present to encourage real access to the justice of the
Church for all the faithful, I would like to underline that a
significant number of cases dealt with before the Roman Rota are
enabled by legal aid granted to those whose economic situation would
not otherwise allow them to engage the services of lawyer”.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment