“And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.” (Other ancient authorities read except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; others add at the end of the verse and he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.) [Matthew 18:8, NRSV]
Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, by Guercino, 1621.
Concerning divorced Catholics who have gone on to a second marriage, the question of the impossibility of their receiving the sacraments of the Eucharist and reconciliation is likely to be very heated at the forthcoming October Extraordinary Synod on the Family. In fact, there is already dueling going on among the cardinals.
Pope Francis has called the synod to discuss “the pastoral challenges of the family”. Of the thirty-nine questions of the questionnaire that was sent out by the synod secretariat, five concern divorced and remarried Catholics. And, dominating the questions concerning this group of Catholics is the question of their admission to Eucharistic communion.
So far, the only way for the divorced and remarried Catholics to be admitted to Eucharistic communion is by way of them first obtaining a decree nullifying their previous marriage celebrated in church. But the discussion on their reception of the Eucharist is very heated, and the pressure to admit them to communion regardless of nullity decrees is very strong not only in public opinion, but amongst bishops and cardinals as well. One reason is that the ecclesiastical marriage tribunals around the world are simply unable to address the great number of cases which are suspected of invalidity. For example, an elderly European missionary to Japan assesses from pastoral experience that there is easily anywhere upwards of one-third of Catholic marriages in Japan that is invalid on account of the absence of one of the essential elements that make up a valid Catholic marriage. One of these elements is permanency of marriage; another is openness to procreation. Pope Francis himself, speaking from his vast experience in the pastoral field of Argentina, estimated that null marriages could be as many as “half” of those celebrated in church, because they are celebrated “without maturity, without realizing that it is for life, for social convenience.”
Churchmen, such as Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müeller of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, who insist that the only way for the divorced-remarried to receive communion is by way of the nullity certificate, ignore too much of the reality. First, while ecclesiastical tribunals exist and function in some countries, large regions in Asia, Africa and Latin America do not even have these tribunals up and running. Second, while tribunal officials in general are understanding and even sympathetic in resolving petitions for nullity, there are officials who are ultra conservative in outlook and are set to defeat the petitioners. Third, even if these are rare, we know of officials who are downright lazy, grossly inefficient, and who make it their business to prevent petitions even from being filed. These and other reasons point to the fact that to insist on the route of nullity-declaration as the only way for divorced-remarried Catholics to be admitted to communion is a serious misreading of the reality on the pastoral turf. Only dogmatic academics, not pastors, are capable of insisting thus.
In this regard, Pope Benedict, as cardinal prefect of the CDF and as pope, had hypothesized on the possibility of allowing access to communion for the divorced-remarried if they “have come to a well-founded conviction of conscience concerning the nullity of their first marriage but are unable to prove this nullity by the judicial route.” At any rate, the pope–emeritus had admitted the complexity of the problem and suggested that it ought to be studied further.
The current head of the CDF, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müeller, perhaps being mindful of his position, had declared in public and in terms that sounded too definitive for anybody’s good [1] that the only way for the divorced-remarried to be admitted to Eucharistic communion is by the judicial route, and [2] that mercy (which Pope Francis has called the Church to show to the world, in imitation of Christ) cannot trump the law. Cardinal Müeller has a firm support from Cardinal Raymond Burke, head of the judiciary in the Vatican known as the Apostolic Signatura. For the two, the watch word is the “law”. When your first word is “law” and your last word is “law”, there is not very much space to do pastoral work really. Masquerading behind the “law”, you have the perfect excuse to not have to attend to the messy and inconvenient work of the “compassion” of Christ and the “mercy” of God. You would think the compassionate and pastoral-minded Pope Francis pretty much out of line here. No wonder, then, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, who is a member of Pope Francis’s eight-member advisory Council of Cardinals, would affirm Archbishop Robert Zollitsch and openly criticized Müeller’s dismissive hard line, insisting that the prefect of CDF cannot unilaterally stop the discussion. He went further, pointing out Müeller’s pastoral flaw in seeking to erect a “fence” around Pope Francis’ teaching on the duty of the Church as a “field hospital” of mercy towards the many wounded in today’s society.
Fortunately, there are many bishops and cardinals who look at their ministry through quite different lenses than that of a relentless dogmatic one. For example, Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga has openly opposed this Müller-lens and told the CDF chief to loosen up and be more flexible about reforms being discussed in the Church.
- He said Mueller – who has opposed any loosening of Church rules on divorce – was a classic German theology professor who thought too much in rigid black-and-white terms. “The world isn’t like that, my brother. You should be a bit flexible when you hear other voices, so you don’t just listen and say, ‘here is the wall’.”
Cardinal Walter Kasper, too, is well known for his open-minded, pastorally sensitive approach. Was that not why Pope Francis invited him to address last February’s extraordinary consistory of Cardinals to discuss preparations for the October Synod?
Can there be a direct forgiving of Second Marriages?
In fact, all these debates would be quite unnecessary if the Church returned to the first centuries and retrieved its ancient practice of pardoning the divorced and remarried of their sins and admitting them to communion. To be sure, this practice was later abandoned in the West. However, and this is of great significance at least for reference, the Eastern Orthodox Church retained the practice to this day.
Giovanni Cereti, a patristics scholar active in ecumenism and conjugal spirituality at Equipes Notre-Dame, has repeatedly drawn attention to how the early Church Fathers came to grips with the problem of second marriages. But the centerpiece of his studies is canon 8 of the Council of Nicaea of 325 A.D.
- “As for those who call themselves pure, if they should wish to enter the catholic Church, this holy and great council establishes [. . .] before all else that they should declare openly, in writing, that they accept and follow the teachings of the catholic Church: and that is that they will enter into communion both with those who have gone on to second marriages and with those who have lapsed in the persecutions, for whom the time and circumstances of penance have been established, so as to follow in everything the decisions of the catholic and apostolic Church.”
The Novatian rigorists had refused to commune with the divorced-remarried and the apostatized even though the latter people had repented. The Church at the time banished those Novatians. Nicaea insisted as a condition for those rigorists’ readmission into the Church that they “enter into communion” with those categories of people. In so doing, Nicaea effectively decided that the Church had the right to forgive second marriages. During the first millennium, both the “forgiving” and the “rigorist” tendencies coexisted in Christianity. By the second millennium, however, the rigorist began to hold sway in the Western Roman Church, while the Eastern Church retained the forgiving strand.
Pope Benedict, especially while he was head of the CDF, had recognized the pastoral attempts of saint Leo and the Eastern Churches to let the mercy of God shine through. He wrote in 1998:
- “It is claimed that the current magisterium relies on only one strand of the patristic tradition, and not on the whole legacy of the ancient Church. Although the Fathers clearly held fast to the doctrinal principle of the indissolubility of marriage, some of them tolerated a certain flexibility on the pastoral level with regard to difficult individual cases. On this basis Eastern Churches separated from Rome later developed alongside the principle of akribia , fidelity to revealed truth, that of oikonomia , benevolent leniency in difficult situations. Without renouncing the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, in some cases they permit a second and even a third marriage, which is distinct, however, from the sacramental first marriage and is marked by a penitential character. Some say that this practice has never been explicitly condemned by the Catholic Church. They claim that the 1980 Synod of Bishops proposed to study this tradition thoroughly, in order to allow the mercy of God to be more resplendent.”
To return to the practices of the Church of the first centuries is to return to a penitential system that opens the door to the divorced-remarried to return to the faith in full.
It seems that Pope Francis, who also referred to the theology of oikonomia operative in the Orthodox Church, is keen to seriously explore the possibility of giving divorced people a second chance. It is quite clear that the present Pope not only understands the mercy of God, but is proactively working to let divine mercy shine in the Church. And his singular focus is pastoral care, away from restrictive laws.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, July 2014. All rights reserved.
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