admitting defeat

Is allowing divorced and civilly remarried people to the reception of Holy Communion essentially just admitting defeat? The message it sends to us lay Catholics is, "The teaching of the Church is essentially not important, it is what you feel that really matters."

It essentially strips our Catholic faith to nothing and leaves us nothing to stand on. If we remove the letter of the law, and disregard the teachings of Christ it will not matter if we bring one person or a million into the reception of Holy Communion because we will have led people to falsely accept a human vision of Christ and not Christ himself. It cannot be called mercy to feed someone sand and tell them it is a steak. Even if you can trick the person to believe the sand is actually a steak, because they desperately want it to be a steak, it still will not nourish them. You will have given them good feelings, made them confident in their eating, but still ultimately led them to certain death.

Mercy is not about making people comfortable in their sin, it is welcoming them as sinner so that they may be lead to Christ. What about the serial killer that works 6 days a week in the soup kitchen, helping feed countless hungry? The 7th day he murders one of them, but helps hundreds more. He does not see anything wrong with his sin, he picks the worst of the lot, he helps hundreds and eliminates one evil person a week. Should he be told that is ok? That he is doing more good than evil? God will not mind if you are unrepentant of that one evil.We could tell him that. He could feel good and come and receive Christ, but in so doing we would be defiling Christ by making an empty promise that cannot possibly be fulfilled.

The serial killer might be an extreme example, but giving people, or a priest the freedom to make the call as to whether an action they commit is sin or not does not to me seem like a good idea. How do you draw people to the confessional, when at the same time you are telling them, no need to repent?

Telling people that their sin is ok, is not a pastoral approach. It is a lazy way out. It encourages people to turn their intellect inward to themselves rather than upward to God. The way of Christ is not meant to be easy. It wasn't easy for the Apostles it wasn't easy for Christ himself. The times cannot change Christ, or the will of God. If this were true, God would have had no need to purge the world with the flood. Couldn't he have just said, "hey I need to get with the times, the people want this. so its all good." Moses wouldn't have needed the 10 commandments at all, the times and the people had already decided to worship the golden calf. Christ died for our sins to be forgiven not to tell us they are ok. He called us to "go forth and sin no more". The Church does need to change with the times, but the times are tough right now for faith. The times, in my opinion, are calling the Church back to tradition, so as to lead people to Christ vs leaving them to their own devices.