From 2006-2009, Ward served as a national board member of Call to Action Next Generation, a youth affiliate of the organization. She chaired that board from 2008-2009.
In 2006, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, then-prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Bishops, wrote that Call to Action's activities "are in contrast with the Catholic Faith due to views and positions held which are unacceptable from a doctrinal and disciplinary standpoint. Thus to be a Member of this Association or to support it, is irreconcilable with a coherent living of the Catholic faith."
Also scheduled to present is Dr. Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a theologian at Manhattan College.
Imperatori-Lee was also a presenter at the October seminar at Boston College. At that seminar, she criticized the Church's "infantilization of the laity," saying that "lay people are infantilized by a logic...where pastors serve as gatekeepers, offering permission for sacraments, rather than as counselors who accompany laypersons on their sacramental journeys."
In a 2015 interview with the podcast Daily Theology, Imperatori-Lee described the late theologian and University of Notre Dame professor Fr. Richard McBrien as a mentor. According to the National Catholic Reporter, "McBrien advocated the ordination of women priests, an end to mandatory celibacy for priests, moral approval of artificial birth control, and decentralization of power in the church."
In a 2016 essay in the magazine America, she wrote "any claim that there are only two kinds of humans, male and female, is simplistic."
Msgr. Jack Alesandro, a canon lawyer from the Diocese of Rockville Centre, also presented at the Boston College seminar, and will present at the upcoming conferences.
At the 2017 seminar, Alesandro said that Amoris Laetitia "as a whole supports the idea that as time passes, sacramental marriages become more sacramental and therefore more indissoluble."
Alesandro also said that Amoris Laetitia suggests new thresholds for the validity of consent to sacramental marriage. The document suggests "a superior capacity and resolve of the will is required of those entering sacramental marriage than of those entering a non-sacramental union," he said.
He said the exhortation "is challenging judges in a tribunal process to discover whether both spouses, including the man, were at the time of the wedding truly capable at the time of tenderness in the sense described by the pope, the tenderness of a mother cradling her infant."
"Spouses must be capable of entering a lifelong adventure, and able to renew it constantly if they are to exchange consent validly. It requires that they be friends on the journey. While they do not start out whole and complete, we know that, they must at least be able to grow into this vocation. If they're incapable of that growth, or they're really not committed to it, I don't think they're validly married, at least, not the Christian marriage."
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"Canon lawyers may find it difficult to get their juridical mind around love, if their thinking has become overly legal, which is another way of saying 'secularized,'" he said.
According to the invitation, "there will be other theologians who will be invited to participate at one or more of the days."
During his Feb. 9 speech, Cardinal Cupich said that Pope Francis has introduced a set of "hermeneutical principles" – principles of theological interpretation – that "force a paradigm shift" in the Church's work with families.
Among the aspects of such a paradigm shift, Cupich said, is "rejecting an authoritarian or paternalistic way of dealing with people that lays down the law, that pretends to have all the answers, or easy answers to complex problems, that suggests that general rules will seamlessly bring immediate clarity or that the teachings of our tradition can preemptively be applied to the particular challenges confronting couples and families."
Cupich further discussed the importance of discernment in conscience. The "voice of conscience-the voice of God...could very well affirm the necessity of living at some distance from the Church's understanding of the ideal, while nevertheless calling a person 'to new stages of growth and to new decisions which can enable the ideal to be more fully realized,'" he said, commenting on an excerpt from Amoris Laetitia.
The cardinal said that a pastoral, not "merely doctrinal," approach is needed in work with families, because "the conscience based Christian moral life does not focus primarily on the automatic application of universal precepts. Rather, it is continually immersed in the concrete situations which give vital context to our moral choices."