Or I could re-do the link properly. Here
Robin
Or I could re-do the link properly. Here
Robin
Aaaah, thank you, but I’m so used to seeing that kind of stuff meant in all seriousness that I took it seriously. goes back to waiting for the MMP
When I was in fourth grade, I was in beginner’s band. We usually practiced in the school cafeteria, which was in the basement of the church. There was a stage and on the stage was a backwall which had a sizeable cupboard in that wall. For some reason or another, in that cupboard, they were storing a lifesize, full color statue of the Pieta that the church had.
With me so far? Well, one of my classmates opened up said cupboard while we were waiting for our band teacher and did kind of a start-he said at first it looked like a dead body.
Whoosh.
but is it with their spouses? :dubious:
No, not all true.
To validly hear confessions – to be a valid minister of the sacrament of penance – a priest must have the requisite faculty under the law. In cases of grave necessity – danger of death – any priest may validly confer this sacrament upon any member of the faithful. But apart from that special circumstance, a priest, and ONLY a priest, may validly hear confessions and grant absolution if he is permitted to. A non-ordained faithful may NOT validly hear confession or grant absolution, even in grave circumstances.
Now, to whom does the law grant the faculty?
The Pope, as you might imagine, may hear anyone’s confession. So, too, does the law grant Cardinals the power to hear confessions of any of Christ’s faithful anywhere. Bishops also have this power, except that an individual Bishop may restrict other bishops from this exercise within his own diocese.
Beyond those cases, the law gets more interesting. A parish pastor is entitled to hear the confessions only of his parishoners, within his own parish – although virtually all bishops grant to their priests the faculty to hear confessions anywhere within their diocese. Even then, priests who are members of religious institutes may not use this faculty without the permission of their Superior. Those members who live day and night in a house of an institute or society may have their confessions heard only by their Superior or the priests given this faculty by their Superior, for instance. There are a number of such delineations in the law. As a matter of practice, it would be rare to find a situation where a particular priest was unable to hear the confession of a perticular member of the faithful, but that’s the result of local Ordinaries habitually granting this faculty, not the law automatically conferring it.
Yup, I did. And I was quite right in stating that the sentence I quoted was the opening sentence of Driscoll’s remarks about pastors’ marital sex lives. Those remarks constitute a separate bullet point in the blog essay by Driscoll that the OP linked to.
Of course, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to my point whether that sentence is the opening sentence of Driscoll’s entire essay or just of that one particular paragraph, so I can only conclude that you’re really desperate for something to nitpick.
I doubt it, since he complains about the unhelpfulness of “a wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about”. Driscoll is quite clearly suggesting that the problem with many pastors’ wives here is not just that they don’t talk frankly about sex, but that they aren’t conscientious enough about maintaining their personal attractiveness and their sexual availability.
Guin, you have just triggered one of my most disturbing Catholic memories. One night there was some community function in the basement at Church of Gesù Bambino. I was about 10 years old and ran loose with the other kids in the basement. While I was playing hide and seek with a girl, I discovered that the door to the priests’ side of the basement, underneath the sacristy, was unlocked and I went in. It was like finding the secret passageway. I was caught up short as I saw the open doorway to a storeroom. And beheld a pale dead body lying on the floor with open lifeless eyes staring upward :eek:
It must have taken me only a second or two to realize it was just an old statue of some saint, painted in colors that would be lifelike if they weren’t so deathly pale. But that second was long enough to freak the holy living daylights out of me.
When I read C.S. Lewis I found out how our stuff looked to Protestants…
Let the Protestants have their gay Christs and gay angels. Catholics always had a flair for death, the ghastlier the better. Today’s Goths understand this.
Yeah, we Catholics have a real morbid streak, don’t we? We ARE the original goths, peeps.
What was it Cecil said about “a Sacred Heart, with Sacred Atria and Sacred Ventricles, and I think once I saw one with a Sacred Aorta”?
Looks like we have a new couple for my latest favourite quiz game.