Cardinal Carlo Martini says Church '200 years behind'

Photo ~ Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini

Cardinal Carlo Martini says Church '200 years behind'
(Thanks to Dr. Joe for submitting this news story.)

Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini has described the Roman Catholic Church as being "200 years behind" the times.

Martini, a popular figure with liberal stances on many issues, commanded great respect from both Pope John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI.

Catholics lacked confidence in the Church, he said in the interview. "Our culture has grown old, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous."

Unless the Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added.

The question, he said, is not whether divorced couples can receive holy communion, but how the Church can help complex family situations.

In 2008, he criticized the Church's prohibition of birth control, saying the stance had likely driven many faithful away, and publicly stated in 2006 that condoms could "in some situations, be a lesser evil".

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wirewrapper13 years ago

I wonder if Martini was close to Bunini when he was around? I would just like to see some sort of action when comments and actions such as this happen. As it is right now, nothing. I guess that's why Vatican I had to come before Vatican II.

philosopher13 years ago

Of course, there is a hierarchy of evils, as explicated by St. Augustine. Moreover, as this Father and doctor of the Church has said in his writings that in a difficult situation, one should choose a lesser evil. Nevertheless, that the lesser evil is evil, it is still an objective evil, and we should always try to avoid it. This form of a graded absolutism is not relativism, situation ethics, making one’s private subjectivity authoritative, or a form of modernism- incorporating modern moral views (aka subjectivism) into the Church in order to attempt to alter her essence, which it seems this type of attitude from Cardinal Martini does.

Giovanni A. Cattaneo13 years ago

Yeah because doing all those things have worked out so well for church of Tudor err... England.

Gloria.TV – News Briefs13 years ago

Comments:
Cardinal Martini Has Had Too Many Martinis: Now Supporting Gay Marriage.
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His argument in one sentence: “In order to grow we must stop stop standing for Truth and instead promote what’s popular.”
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The Church being 200 years behind the times makes me think of some wise words.
“The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion. ... As usual, the wisest men of the age are not dominated by the spirit of the age. ... A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world. ... The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is especially up to date or ‘in the know’. ... To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant.”
-G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)