Addressing students at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio earlier this month, Cardinal Burke discussed attacks on family life and the Church's response.

He said students must be wary of abandoning natural law and watering down faith and tradition in order to make certain practices acceptable.

"Some have gone too far to assert that the Church cannot speak of the natural law, intrinsically evil acts, irregular unions, and so forth.

"Their point is that the language itself already makes the culture hostile.

"However, doing so, the Church gives the impression of wanting to draw near to the culture, but without a clear identity of her own self and of what she has to say to the culture."

The cardinal urged students to have the strength to listen to and engage in the cultural debate of marriage, but not to forsake their identity in the name of tolerance.

He encouraged students to carry out all dialogue with honour and respect.

"According to divine wisdom, the Church must always speak the truth with love.

"Yes, the Church should go to the peripheries of today's culture, but always secure in her identity, manifesting the greatest compassion which necessarily involves respect for the truth of the current situation which many times is marked by confusion and error regarding the most fundamental truths of human life and its cradle which is the family."

Cardinal Burke also said: "In the present moment, when the attacks on matrimony and on the family even within the Church seem the most ferocious, it is the Church who must show to the whole of society the truth in all its richness and, therefore, the beauty and the goodness of marriage and the family."

Some Italian bishops have reportedly barred Cardinal Burke from speaking in their dioceses.

There have also been claims that he would be supportive of a schism should the outcomes of the upcoming synod on the family be contrary to his convictions.

Cardinal Burke has previously rejected such accusations.

Sources

• Daily Signal
• Image: Lifesitenews

In a presentation at the so-called "shadow council" at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University in May, Fr Alain Thomasset, SJ, described such labelling is one of the main problems in the pastoral care of families.

Understanding some acts as intrinsically evil, he said, "seems incomprehensible to many and seems pastorally counterproductive".

He wrote there is a just insistence "on points of reference as the targets of the moral life".

But this approach neglects the "biographical dimension of existence" and the "conditions of each personal journey".

He suggested that a "narrative and biographical perspective obliges one to believe that moral evaluation does not cover isolated acts".

Rather it covers "human acts included in a story".

Thus "one should not be too quick to qualify a sexual or contraceptive act as intrinsically evil!"

Fr Thomasset said that "the objective ethical references provided by the Church are just one item (essential, certainly, but not the only item) of moral discernment that must be operated within the personal conscience".

He called for increased listening to the experience and the sensus fidei of couples "who are seeking to best live out their call to holiness".

The priest, who is a professor of moral theology at Centre Sèvres-Facultés Jésuites de Paris, proposed an interpretation of human moral acts "remaining within the context of Catholic tradition, which would bear various consequences".

The first of these consequences, he said, is that "in certain cases, because of particular circumstances, the sexual acts of remarried couples would no longer be considered as morally guilty".

"This would open their access to the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist".

The other consequences, according to a Catholic News Agency article: the use of contraceptives would not be morally wrong, as long as the couple were married and "remain open" to welcoming life; and the "subjective moral responsibility" of sexual acts between homosexuals in a stable and faithful relationship would be "diminished or eliminated".

"It's about helping people live the humanly possible in a path of growth toward the desirable," Fr Thomasset wrote.

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Our Greater Destiny