It is true that sexual morality is not at the heart of the hierarchy of truths of the faith in precisely the limited sense that no moral teaching of the Church is at the heart. Yet in pastoral practice we have placed it at the very center of our structures of exclusion from the Eucharist. Sexual activity, while profound, does not lie at the heart of this hierarchy. The church has a hierarchy of truths that flow from this fundamental kerygma. The heart of Christian discipleship is a relationship with God the Father, Son and Spirit rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But even as he attempts to collapse the distinction between sinner and sin, McElroy draws a bright line between the moral life and our relationship with God, just as he does between pastoral and doctrinal matters. The Church has gone to great lengths to insist that no one is excluded from receiving the Eucharist because of sexual orientation, which Cardinal McElroy surely knows. So we read, for example, “he exclusion of men and women because of their marital status or their sexual orientation/activity is pre-eminently a pastoral question, not a doctrinal one.” Sin is not what divides us the Church’s hang-ups about sin do. Exclusion is treated not as a consequence of sin, but as something inflicted upon sinners by the Church. Concrete acts by particular moral agents simply don’t register. While pastoral in tone, the essay deals almost entirely in abstractions. ![]() Richard Niebuhr’s famous line: “A God without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Which is to say: this was in no way an edifying document. Reading the essay, I couldn’t help but think of H. ![]() Catholics, particularly on the issue of participation in the Eucharist.” The essay covers a lot of ground, but the bulk of it is concerned with the questions of how to address, “the exclusion of divorced and remarried and L.G.B.T. Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego has penned a lengthy reflection ( available here) on how the synodal process might address the exclusion of certain categories of people.
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