Francis in 2016: Lifelong Fornication with the Same Person is a Real Marriage

A Warning to the World Meeting of Families…

Francis in 2016: Lifelong Fornication with the Same Person is a Real Marriage

As the World Meeting of Families in Dublin is drawing to a close, “Pope” Francis prepares to visit Ireland to grace the participants there with his presence. Considering that the event is a family conference, we would like to take the opportunity to remind everyone what Jorge Bergoglio thinks about the nature of holy matrimony and its contrary, the vice of fornication. The following quote is from a 2016 address the papal pretender gave to “priests” from the diocese of Rome:

Another one of my experiences in Buenos Aires: the pastors, when they held preparation courses, there were always 12 or 13 couples, no more, they did not reach 30 people. The first question they asked: “How many of you are living together?”. The majority raised their hands. They prefer to live together, and this is a challenge, it calls for work. Not to say straight away: “Why don’t you get married in Church?”. No. Accompany them: wait and cultivate. And cultivate fidelity. In the Argentine countryside, in the Northeastern region, there is a superstition: that couples have a child, they live together. In the countryside this happens. Then, when the child must go to school, they have a civil marriage. And then, as grandparents, they have a religious marriage. It is a superstition, because they say that having a religious wedding straight away scares the husband! We must also fight against these superstitions. Yet really, I say that I have seen a great deal of fidelity in these cohabiting couples, a great deal of fidelity; and I am certain that this is a true marriage, they have the grace of matrimony, precisely because of the fidelity that they have. But there are local superstitions. It is the most difficult ministry, that of marriage.

(Antipope Francis, Address at the Opening of the Pastoral Congress of the Diocese of Rome, vatican.va, Jun. 16, 2018; underlining added.)

Notice the underlined parts. Francis is saying that people who “cohabitate” — that is, live together as though they were husband and wife but without actually being married — are in a true marriage insofar as they are “faithful” to one another, and that this “fidelity” is a “grace” from God and ought to be “cultivated”!

This is staggeringly blasphemous and gravely erroneous, approaching heresy. At the Council of Florence, Pope Eugene IV decreed: “The efficient cause of matrimony is regularly mutual consent expressed by words in person… [and] the bond of a marriage legitimately contracted is perpetual” (Bull Exultate Deo; Denz. 702). In other words, a marriage does not consist of repeated acts of fornication limited to one particular partner. In 1788, Pope Pius VI affirmed: “It is a dogma of faith that matrimony, which before the coming of Christ was nothing other than an indissoluble contract, after the coming of Christ was made one of the seven sacraments of the New Law…” (Apostolic Letter Deessemus Nobis; qtd. in Sacrae Theologiae Summa, vol. IVB, n. 196).

Francis’ idea that if you fornicate long enough with one and the same person, it becomes a marriage, is so absurd that not even the secular state accepts it! Even in the civil law, there must be a matrimonial contract. You can’t just live together with someone and then this cohabitation magically turns into a marriage. So Francis is at odds not only with the Catholic Church — which would be nothing new — but even with the anti-Catholic world he so loves to accommodate.

As for the “fidelity” Francis claims to discover in cohabitating couples, this is another Bergoglian absurdity. Fornicators cannot practice fidelity because fidelity (“faithfulness”) refers to the marriage vow — that exchange of consent in the presence of witnesses which results in certain marital rights and obligations “until death do us part”. Someone who is faithful to this vow honors the solemn promise by which he bound himself exclusively to his wife until his own or his wife’s death should end the marriage bond. Fornicators thus cannot be “faithful” because there is no matrimonial vow, contract, or bond to be faithful to.

Despite the gravity of Francis’ error about marriage, to our knowledge no one of note among “conservative” Novus Ordos has denounced him for it. The fact that he said this in a meeting with “priests” and not in an encyclical letter or other putatively magisterial document is irrelevant to the fact that he has openly stated that he rejects the Catholic understanding of holy matrimony. The scandal such a statement can cause is immense.

However, this is by no means the only way in which Bergoglio has attacked holy wedlock. For example, we recall his claim, made in the same meeting, that most (later revised to a portion of) true marriages are invalid because people don’t know about indissolubility (a contention we refuted here). We also remember his sanction of drive-thru annulments, which will cause further untold harm to souls, especially children. And of course we cannot forget his blasphemous claim in Amoris Laetitia, n. 303, that in some cases, God Himself desires someone to commit adultery — a direct reversal of the Sixth Commandment from “Thou shalt not commit adultery” to “Thou shalt”!

This is just the guy you’d want to preach to the crowds at the World Meeting of Families, isn’t it?

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