Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has said in his 50 years of voting in US elections, he has never seen the two major parties offer “two such deeply flawed” presidential nominees “at the same time”.
Without naming the nominees – Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton – the archbishop said that he presumed they “intend well and have a reasonable level of personal decency behind their public images, but I also believe that each candidate is very bad news for our country, though in different ways.
“One candidate, in the view of a lot of people, is a belligerent demagogue with an impulse-control problem,” he said in a speech at the University of Notre Dame. “And the other, also in the view of a lot of people, is a criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and bad priorities.”
Archbishop Chaput delivered the 2016 Tocqueville lecture on religious liberty, sponsored by the school’s Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life.
Though faced with flawed presidential candidates, he said, Catholics and other Christians do not have “the luxury of cynicism”, because if they “leave the public square, other people with much worse intentions won’t.” Many honest public officials were currently serving the country well, and both parties had “good candidates for other public offices”, he said.
Christians “have a duty to leave the world better than we found it”, the archbishop said. “One of the ways we do that, however imperfectly, is through politics. Elections do matter.” He added that the next president might have the chance to appoint Supreme Court justices.
Francis harmonises canon law codes of East and West
Pope Francis has changed 11 canons in the Latin Rite Code of Canon Law in order to harmonise the laws of the Latin and Eastern Catholic churches on several issues involving the sacraments of baptism and marriage.
Among other changes, Latin Rite Catholic deacons may not preside at a wedding when one or both of the new spouses are members of an Eastern Catholic church.
After more than 15 years of study and worldwide consultation, the conflicting rules were resolved by adopting the Eastern code’s formulations for the Latin Church as well, according to Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.
The changes to the Latin Code of Canon Law, the 1983 text governing the majority of the world’s Catholics, were announced in an apostolic letter published motu proprio (on the personal initiative of the Pope).
In the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions, the blessing of a priest is necessary for the validity of a marriage. In the Latin Rite church, a deacon can preside over the sacrament.
Olympic medal given to shrine
A Croatian high-jumper who won bronze at the Rio Olympics has given her medal to the Shrine of St Mary of Marija Bistrica as a gesture of gratitude.
Blanka Vlašić, who had surgery before the Games, told the Catholic website Crux that she was inspired by a line from St Paul, who said some train “to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever”.
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