Pope Francis did not change Church teaching on the rules for receiving Communion, but rather assured people in difficult situations that the Church cares for them and the mercy of God extends to them, a Nigerian cardinal has said. Speaking at Ghana’s National Eucharistic Congress in Jasikan, Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Abuja said it was unfortunate that pressure had mounted on the Church in some places to relax the rules on the reception of Holy Communion. Such pressure, he said, can be seen in efforts to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion without an annulment of their marriage or without abstaining from sexual relations with their new partners. The age-old principles of the unity and indissolubility of marriage cannot be compromised to accommodate modern trends, he said. “In a world going down the drain through widespread moral laxity, the Church of God cannot abdicate her responsibility to uphold the high standards of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ,” Cardinal Onaiyekan told Catholics gathered for the congress. Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia on the family clearly reaffirms the traditional doctrine of the Church, he said. In the document’s final chapter, Pope Francis raised the issue of some Catholics in problematic situations, not as the norm but as exceptional cases, the cardinal said. The Pope spoke about those cases to encourage people who are in difficulty, and to assure them that the Church is aware of their burdens and struggles, and that no one is excluded from God’s mercy. But the mercy of God does not replace or cancel the laws of God and the rules of the Church, the Nigerian cardinal said. Participation in the Mass, even without receiving Communion, is not a futile exercise, Cardinal Onaiyekan said. In Catholic tradition, that participation is referred to as “spiritual communion”, and is an expression of faith that God find his way to anybody who is well disposed, whether or not that person is in a regular position to receive Communion. “We must be thoroughly convinced that nobody is worthy to receive the Holy Eucharist,” the cardinal said. “It means, therefore, that whoever is in a position under the rules of the Church to approach the Holy Eucharist must do so with fear and trembling and with deep humility.”