Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” [John 8:10-11, NRSV]
[L] Lorenzo Lotto, Christ and the Adulteress. c.1530. [R] Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, by Gustav Dore, 1865.
The divorced and remarried in the Catholic Church represent a group that warrants urgent pastoral care, not more documents, or judgments, or label of “irregular” unions. Their exclusion from the Eucharist is an issue that has been a source of pain for many. Increasingly, they have become a “group” that suffers within the Church, a group whom the Church appears to fail to minister to on the one hand and to unfairly judge against, marginalize and ostracise on the other. To allow or to deny Communion to this group is no longer just a recurring question, but a pressing one as well, and one that involves a great deal of unaddressed pain.
The Eucharist enjoys a singularly “high” theology in the Roman Catholic Church, epitomized in such exalted description like “the source and summit of Christian life”. In such a church context, Eucharistic exclusion is always experienced as a harsh form of judgment and marginalization, adding pain and humiliation to the wounds of marital failure. Whether such a painful experience is intentionally imposed by the Church or a mere inadvertent consequence of the church law does not change the reality that it is a repugnant practice of exclusion.
Five things easily get ignored or turn fuzzy in exclusionist mindsets:
- 1. Catholics generally appreciate and desire the sacramental marriage as the ideal form of a couple’s union, even though this becomes unattainable in practice sometimes.
- 2. We neglect much when we fail to realize that people do not get married with the thought of getting divorced. Myriad reasons contribute to people finding out that while it is “easy to love,” in reality it may be very difficult “to live together.” Despite the best intentions at the start, relationships go bad, and some break down irretrievably. Dreams get shattered.
- 3. Nobody announces that going through a civil divorce is fun.
- 4. Deep down, the stigma, pain and hurt of a divorce never leave the divorcees.
- 5. More than sympathy, they need actual support and encouragement in the way of forming or strengthening new and caring relationships.
The faith community can throw the law books at them to put them down, and keep them down, or the faith community can see them as human persons caught in difficult intersections whose pains and wounds deserve urgent ministering to. The caring Church epitomized by the pastoral style of Pope Francis not only preaches pastoral care but actually insists on doing pastoral care ahead of all else. Reaching out to the divorced and remarried Catholics, and being more merciful and open to them, will allow the ministerial Church to better serve people who need extra help and support in forming and strengthening new, healthy relationships. However the Church argues the rule of Eucharistic-exclusion at the doctrinal level, there is no denying the reality that divorced and remarried Catholics experience deep suffering under ecclesiastical judgment and punishment, compounding the wounds of irretrievable marital breakdown. Worse yet, in the midst of this inhospitable experience, what is seriously lacking is any opportunity for repentance, forgiveness, healing and real communal acceptance.
- A dogmatic Church deeply entrenched in laws distilled from ideas and theories would hunker down to Eucharistic prohibitions and rules of exclusion which succeed not in ministering to people in pain but in further marginalizing them, offering no reconciliation.
- A ministerial Church acting under Christ’s mandate to serve, especially the poor and needy, on the other hand, would do away with a closed communion table and find ways to shift towards a greater Eucharistic hospitality.
Nobody seriously challenges the need for Church doctrines. But the danger is real, that church officials, particularly those isolated from the lived experiences of ordinary people, become so preoccupied with law and doctrine as did the Jewish religious leaders in Jesus’ time, that their institutional authority and credibility are seriously jeopardized. Pope Francis sees through all this with incisive clarity. Reflecting on the casuistic thought of the Pharisees in Mark 10:1-12, the Pope refers to it as “always a trap”. Jesus himself would avoid this trap, insisting on seeing man and woman as the masterpiece of creation in whom God planted the initial plan of love. When love fails between a man and woman, they suffer. The Pope stresses the importance of the pastoral task of accompanying those who suffer, not condemning them and “not be casuistic with their situation.” To this Pope of strong pastoral sense, of great urgency is the fact that casuistic notions and ideas often get in the way of pastoral care. We seriously need to see the difference between doctrine on the one hand, and pastoral mercy and care on the other. While Vatican officials have always tended to lean heavily towards the former, Pope Francis from the outset has set his vision and pastoral approach on the latter.
And so, to the forthcoming Family Synod in October this year, the Pope has assigned the task of seriously examining how the Church might realistically meet the pastoral challenges of evangelizing the family in modern times. In the context of the synod’s theme, thinking from the likes of Paulo Friere ought to help mold an approach that is characterized by placing doctrinal theme in dialectic interaction with pastoral exigencies. Crucially, the indispensable key in that dialectic interaction is that the example of the Lord Himself, exemplified in the Gospels, must guide our steps. The question ought to be “What is a more Jesus-like approach?”
We offer a response to that question by turning first to the Bible to capture Christ’s vision and then to positive pastoral initiatives among theologians and local churches around the world.
For a positive biblical vision, Jesus enacted a blueprint for our pastoral strategy where the God of mercy and compassion takes precedence over all else, in the way he showed mercy, forgave the woman caught in adultery and helped her to move towards a wholesome life [John 8:1-11].
- Pastoral ministry is at its best when we apply the two-step approach Jesus demonstrated in his pastoral assistance to the woman. Jesus does not begin with a demand for compliance with the law. He begins with pastoral compassion. But in the end Jesus does not leave the matter there. By telling the woman to “go, and sin no more,” Jesus then imposes a moral demand on her to live a clean life from then on. The two elements – compassion and demand – constitute the blueprint, the very spirit, by which the pastoral ministry of the Church ought to be conducted.
- But in this blueprint, the order is the key: treat people in difficulties with pastoral compassion first, and consult the moral texts and canon law later.
To suffering people, what they need is an understanding heart and a listening ear, more than anything else. So first, we sit down with them and listen to their sorrows, understand their problems and offer them comfort. We do not start off with a long sermon on the moral laws of the Church – that is not the way of Jesus. Like the woman, people in difficulties need someone to help them, someone to encourage them and not put them down with some tough doctrine or strict law [“Neither do I condemn you” (John 8:7)].
- Jesus shows us how he helped the woman, which is to see the broken heart before the broken law.
To the ordinary Catholics, nothing is more objectionable when ministers of the Church appear to them as behaving like modern day scribes and Pharisees who are in a position on account of vested authority to help the people, to seriously do something to lessen their burden under the law, but who walk around in long phylacteries, tying up heavy burdens and laying them on the people’s shoulders, but are unwilling to lift a finger to relieve them (Matthew 23:4). How on earth are the suffering people going to live their lives “abundantly” or “to the full” (John 10:10)?
It is no gratuitous infatuation that people across the globe are drawn to Pope Francis and many are actually returning to the Church. His pastoral vision follows closely that of the Lord’s, that is, seeing the human person first, compassionately loving him or her, ministering to their pain, bringing them the mercy and compassion of God, before alerting them to the Church’s tradition and law. In other words, the Pope wants to focus on the human person – standing before you is a human person, a child of God, not a set of laws and doctrines. In his Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis turns to a theme he raised in an interview with Antonio Spadaro.
- “Pastoral ministry in a missionary style is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed” [Evangelii Gaudium, 35].
The pastoral spirit of the Holy Father is grounded in the mercy of God which the Church is called to be to the world. To the bishops of Brazil in July 2013, he spoke a deep insight on the “grave wounds” that families in our times are undergoing:
- “So we need a Church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of ‘wounded’ persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love.”
In like manner, one cannot but admire the deep spiritual insight of the late Yves Congar to whom “the Church is not walls, or barriers either, but people, the faithful.”
For a positive pastoral proposal that aims at alleviating pain, the following, sieved from an admittedly mixed bag of opposing voices, represent the kind of promising direction along which the Church could move forward in pastoral care:
On 21 March 1975, upon a request for clarification on what the “Church’s approved practice in the internal forum” was, Archbishop Hamer, the Secretary of CDF wrote:
- “I would like to state now that this phrase [probata praxis Ecclesiae] must be understood in the context of traditional moral theology. These couples [Catholics living in irregular marital unions] may be allowed to receive the sacraments on two conditions, that they try to live according to the demands of Christian moral principles and that they receive the sacraments in churches in which they are not known so that they will not create any scandal.”
To be shepherds, ministers must be willing to walk with their flock in the fields. Doctrinal hegemony is not going to do it. The Church of Christ must always seek to be inclusive. A Church that really wishes to minister to the hurting divorced and remarried cannot but listen carefully to Pope Francis in this regard about keeping doors open:
- “Everyone can share in some way in the life of the Church; everyone can be part of the community, nor should the doors of the sacraments be closed for simply any reason. This is especially true of the sacrament which is itself “the door”: baptism. The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” [Evangelii Gaudium, 47].
The whole Church, beginning especially with those who hold ecclesiastical power to deny and exclude people from the table of the Lord, need to hear, again and again, what the Holy Father is saying here: the Eucharist is not a reward for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.
The late Cardinal Carlo Martini in his last interview, published posthumously, urged bishops to take the positive approach of giving encouragement, instead of the negative approach of issuing prohibitions. Harsh and unyielding doctrine does not bring Jesus to anyone; compassion and inclusive outreach does. Martini did not think it wise for officers of the Church to govern by power rather than by love, by law rather than by compassion. Of the sacraments, he said:
- “The sacraments are not a disciplinary instrument, but a help for people at moments on their journey and when life makes them weak. Are we bringing the sacraments to the people who need a new strength? I’m thinking of all the divorced people and couples who have remarried and extended families. They need a special protection.”
As a block of churchmen, the Conference of Bishops in Germany is exemplary in a local church’s attempt to do what is right by Christ in ministering to the divorced and remarried members of the Church through Eucharistic-inclusion. In continuity with the spirit and openness of their retired confreres such as Cardinal Walter Kasper, and proposing local norms which in essence adopt Jesus’ two-step approach of compassion first and demand second, the German bishops look to the Holy Father for support to keep the topic on the table at the coming 2014 Synod. German Prelates are seeking affirmation of particular German norms and procedures that give substance to subsidiarity and leave particular discernment to clergy on the ground. Their vision is inclusive, and their pastoral aim is to bring the divorced and remarried back to full membership of the faith community. They evince a positive pastoral spirit and insight, bringing much–needed relief from the burden of presumed-sin and deep pain.
The practice of blessing second marriages, in suitable cases, by the Orthodox Church is well known to students of Canon Law. This is another worthy avenue for exploration to which the Holy Father has himself alluded. To that practice we shall turn on the next post.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, June 2014. All rights reserved.
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