Did the Pope just admit remarried Catholics to communion?
Strictly speaking, no.
Did he make it possible for others to make decisions in that direction?
Most likely.
Let’s start by backing up a bit:
So far as I understand, when the Pope speaks of “conscience”, there are two ways in which he might be referring to a remarried Catholic receiving communion in good conscience, absent an annulment or “living as brother and sister”: either he refers to a person who believes in their heart that the first marriage was invalid, though it can’t be proven (because, in the end, annulments are tricky, requiring as they do some interpretation of not just one’s own intentions but another’s, too – I yammered on at length about this previously), or of someone who rejects church teaching on marriage, despite, to the best of their ability, reading, reflecting and praying about the issue with an earnest desire to seek the will of God rather than their own desire. In the former case, there’s a sort of “benefit of the doubt” issue, and in the latter case, well, it’s all about the question of the definition of a mortal sin in the first place.
Here’s what the Catechism has to say:
For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.”
Grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments, corresponding to the answer of Jesus to the rich young man: “Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and your mother.” . . .
Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice.” (Paragraphs 1857 – 1859)
And, so far as I understand, “full knowledge” means more than just having an intellectual knowledge of what’s on the “sin list,” but does take into account the ability of a person to, in their own conscience, understand that it’s sinful. And “consent” is broader than just the legal sense: “the promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense” (paragraph 1860).
So all of this is nothing new, just a matter of emphasis.
But, so far as I can tell, the debate has moved beyond this. Bishops and priests appear to be seeking permission/justification to “approve” their parishioners to receive communion, not as a matter of the parishioner weighing his conscience in the matter, nor assessing the validity of the first marriage, but even in cases where the first marriage is acknowledged as having been valid and the parishioner is looking for guidance in forming his conscience.
The phrasing I’m reading repeatedly is that the Pope is offering priests and bishops the opportunity to “offer Communion on a case-by-case basis” (e.g., the article at the L.A. Times, printed in the Chicago Tribune). Locally, the Tribune quotes Archbishop Cupich:
Cupich called the document “a game changer for the way we as a diocese are going to work with people.”
“There’s not really any doctrine as such that’s changed, but there is, I think, a very fresh way that will strike Catholic people in the pews and the priests about how we pastorally deal with people, especially those people whose lives are really very complicated,” Cupich told the Tribune.
The document, though, should not be read as an open invitation for everyone who is divorced and remarried to automatically receive communion, Cupich said. Rather, it invites them to a conversation and a discernment process with their pastors that could lead them to communion one day.
Cupich said he hopes the pope’s guidelines show divorced and remarried Catholics that they do still belong in the church and give license to priests, like himself, who have been taking that approach for a while.
“There is a mindset within the life of the church among Catholics that if in fact they do have marriage breakups and they get into a second marriage that its kind of over for them unless they can get an annulment. The pope is saying that’s not the case,” Cupich said. “I do think that maybe some priests have been working with people in their own counseling. This is an official way in which we’re being encouraged to stay close to those people and reach out to them.”
What, exactly, does Cupich mean with “lead them to communion one day”? What do Cupich and like-minded bishops and priests do when counseling parishioners (to the extent that they have conversations with individual parishioners)? What criteria does he have in mind? Does Cupich, in private, tell parishioners that, if your second marriage is strong, and you treat your spouse well, and meet all your obligations to your first spouse and children, and are otherwise well-behaved and right with God, you’re good to go, as Kasper and Marx had proposed in Germany (in the previously-linked post)?
The Pope scolds those looking for clarity: “By thinking that everything is black and white, we sometimes close off the way of grace and of growth,” the LA Times quotes. And he seems to even toss this back, as the opposite of Obama’s comment about abortion and when life begins being “above my pay grade”: the National Catholic Register quotes an introductory section, saying “he says in the introduction that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues ‘need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium,’ but that ‘each country or region’ can seek solutions ‘better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs’.”
But he is the leader of the Church, and owes Catholics some leadership. He might wish he could defer this discussion to the next Pope, he might prefer not to be on point here, in the same way as Obama never had any interest in dealing with crises in the Middle East, but if his intentional vagueness is interpreted as license to change by those looking for it, and if priests and bishops in fact decide to create “facts on the ground” in the way that they counsel parishioners, perceiving the Pope as having given them permission to do so — well, what then?
(But incidentally, from what I’ve told, priests and bishops shy away from making categorical statements of any kind when asked by parishioners for guidance on what’s right and what’s wrong, and waffle when asked about contraception, or pre/non-marital sex, and every now and again a woman telling her “I had an abortion” story will say that her own priest gave her the OK. I don’t know from experience, but, then again, I don’t even know to what extent priests counsel individual parishioners, vs. them being shunted off to deacons or pastoral associates, or not even feeling like a priest would have time for them in the first place.)
The Pope’s approach seems to be, “meet people with mercy, compassion, and love, and all the rest will follow — they’ll find healing for what troubles them and ultimately seek to do God’s will in their lives, and look to the teachings of the Church for guidance.” But at the same time, how are they to even learn what the teachings of the Church are, if everyone’s afraid to teach them, for fear of causing offense, or if they become mere “ideals” in the same way as, ideally, I ought to exercise consistently and eat more vegetables? And is Francis’s program of calling for mercy and compassion enough? Is it really working? Is it bringing people (back) to regular worship, or to belief in God, or to conversion? Or are people hearing his words as “Francis tells me I’m just fine the way I am” or, alternatively, angry that an explicit statement of acceptance (e.g., of gay marriage) isn’t forthcoming? Francis strikes me as indifferent to this question — he just doesn’t want it to be on his agenda, he wants to be able to presuppose that his constituency isn’t going anywhere, so that he can deal with the agenda he wants to create, that of calling that constituency to setting out on the mission he prescribes for them.
And in the meantime, locally, Cupich is beginning a renewal effort of his own. Whether this is just a structured way of managing the decline and closing churches and schools with the least resistance, or whether he’s able to figure out the magic formula for true revitalization, getting more people in the pews, active in ministries, and believing in the teachings of the Church, I don’t know, but I don’t think anyone else has figured that out, either. The Methodists have an ongoing advertising campaign called Rethink Church (this blog post is over a year old, but they started running their ads again recently), which tries to attract members by promoting itself as a social service/volunteerism club, but I’m doubtful that people would be willing for their social service club organizers to tell them about morality. Will it work to say, “let’s just stop talking about morals and maybe no one will notice what we believe”?
So I am not an expert. I don’t really know what would bring people back to Church. Heck, I don’t really understand people all that well in general. I’m just giving you my reactions. What are yours?
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