Stephen Kent
Remarks from several participants attending a meeting of cardinals, a run-up to the October synod on the family, lend some encouragement to the possibility that a church of “yes” will emerge from a church of “no.”
German Cardinal Walter Kasper, at the invitation of Pope Francis, introduced in late February a discussion to the College of Cardinals on family life. The church must find a way to help those divorced and remarried Catholics who wish to participate fully in the life of the church, he said. He allowed for the possibility that, in specific cases, the church could tolerate but not accept a second marriage.
A validly married Catholic who divorces and enters a second marriage cannot participate in the Eucharist while the original spouse is alive.
While the indissolubility of a marriage and the impossibility of a new marriage cannot be abandoned, the cardinal said, “there is no human situation absolutely without hope or solution.”
“A pastoral approach of tolerance, clemency and indulgence,” he said, would show that “the sacraments are not a prize for those who behave well or for an elite, excluding those who are most in need.”
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British Cardinal Vincent Nichols called for “much more positive ways we engage with people whose marriages have broken down.”
The teaching that marriage is an indissoluble bond between husband and wife cannot be changed, said German Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.
“There is no solution, since church dogma isn’t just some theory created by some theologians,” Cardinal Muller said. “It represents the words of Jesus Christ, which is very clear. I cannot change church doctrine.”
There is no solution, says one. There is no human situation without hope or solution, says another. Such a classic confrontation of “we’ve always done it that way” versus “let’s think of one good reason why it can be done” seems to create a chasm.
The chasm may be bridged by Pope Francis using a new tool: love.
The synod will meet in October. But what can be accomplished is accommodating to modern times without sacrificing the truth. We can find ways to adapt to the times without changing doctrine.
A starting point is the agreement that there is a great lack of understanding among Catholics about the true nature of marriage. It is complicated to explain to two 20- or 30-somethings to search deep down, understand and appreciate what it means to be married until “death us part.”
The church can plan to do a better job in this area in the future. Meanwhile, it has to assist those who need spiritual care, not condemn them.
A shift in emphasis to help sacramental marriages prosper and to help those failing should be undertaken with the same intensity spent on opposition to same-sex marriage.
We can learn from Pope Francis taking the pastoral approach.
“When this love fails — for it often fails — we need to feel the pain of the failure,” he said, and we don’t need to condemn “but to walk with them.”
He also speaks of “how much love, and what great closeness we should also have for our brothers and sisters who, in their lives, have had the misfortune of a failed love.”
Acting pastorally, seeking solutions, let’s think of one good reason why it can be done.
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Kent is the retired editor of archdiocesan newspapers in Omaha and Seattle. Contact him at: considersk@gmail.com.
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This conversation is amazing. There is one answer for any sinful practice be it stealing, untruthfulness, or illicit marriage. Stop the sinful behavior. That is all any person that is committing sin has to do and than ask forgiveness, do penance and resolve to stop it in the future,
The real question is who do these people love more, their illicit spouse or GOD!!!!!!!
Thank you, Kent, for this heads-up for the upcoming Synod of Bishops this October on the family, in part providing the faithful an opportunity to offer up their prayers so that the Bishops, Archbishops, and Cardinals do not abandon hope, a theological virtue, in seeking a solution to the problem of divorce and remarriage within a time and secular culture when despair is more the norm than hope and when the children caught in the middle of this crisis are often forgotten by love or are used as pawns by parents in their power struggles with each other (i.e., husband with wife, wife with husband, or ex with ex).
Too often the case, too, the children are seen to have lost their promise of having a Catholic heritage when the smoke has cleared from these broken marriages and non-canonical remarriages and it becomes evident that consequent exclusion of either or both spouses from the Sacraments of The Catholic Church means in practice that the children will fail to receive their own catechetical education in and First Confession and Communion within the Catholic faith and thus, in effect, are unwittingly sent into the wilderness without the precious source and summit of the faith, the Eucharist, as one’s food of Christ Himself as one grows up, without, even, then, awareness of their need for Mary, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, to lead them to and have a relationship with Jesus, Christ the King.
One way this happens is that, for various reasons, the parent himself or herself abandons the Catholic faith entirely and ‘converts’ into another religion with a totally different understanding of what the Eucharist is, as is true amongst various Protestant denominations that he or she heads into. Oftentimes, the uneducated and vulnerable child duly goes along and does the same.
With the Catholic Church often focused on the parents, it may thus lose sight of the children who thus are left to their own devices as far as matters of faith are concerned. This is true especially when these children grow up and become adults. For the children or the once children, that is an unjust and undeserved consequence that the Church needs to address and redress, perhaps in the process, then, plumbing even more deeply into the Mystery of Love whose reality has now become more evident because of our former beloved Holy Father, Benedict XVI, through his Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est as given in Rome on Christmas Day, 2005. From its third paragraph: “…I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others.”
I hope, then, that the Princes of the Church can lavishly share the love of the Church with these children, perhaps with even the pastoral arm of the Church humbling itself while remaining true to the truth, the Deposit of Faith, by identifying from searches of names in archived records and then being proactive and reaching out to embrace in love these human persons who were once children but who now have achieved their ages of majority and thus are no longer under the legal parental authority of the State. It is presumed that the Church will have the names of many of these children in its archived records through their having received infant baptisms by priests or deacons ordained within the Roman Catholic Church.