Back in May, I offered some general comments on the question of communion for divorced and remarried Catholics — which looms over the Synod on the Family scheduled for this autumn in Rome, and may represent one of the defining controversies of Pope Francis’s pontificate — and then wrote what was intended to be the first of two posts addressing Cardinal Walter Kasper’s high-profile case for admitting the remarried to the sacrament. That post offered theological and sociological reasons to be skeptical of Kasper’s broad suggestion, offered in an interview with the editors of Commonweal, that Catholic marriage generally is in a crisis more severe even than divorce statistics would suggest, in which (he argued) possibly as many as half of all Catholic marriages are actually invalid. The second post, which I promised and then didn’t deliver, was supposed to be a detailed response to his specific proposal on communion, which he first presented in remarks to his fellow cardinals in the winter and then elaborated again in the Commonweal interview this spring.
Now I’m going to try to finally deliver that response — but in a slightly different form than I originally envisioned, because there’s a new critical assessment of Kasper’s argument, written by a group of American Dominicans, that covers the theological and historical issues in much greater detail and with a far deeper grounding in the relevant material than anything I’m likely to write here. Readers interested in the the subject — whether as Catholics or Christians or simply because they want to understand why the adoption of Kasper’s proposal could lead to an internal crisis in the life of the planet’s largest religious body — should really turn to that assessment first. Readers interested in my own, more non-expert thoughts, meanwhile, can forge ahead. (And readers who think I’m returning to this subject on this particular week because I can’t come up with a clear opinion on the latest Obamacare debate should turn to my spokesman, Francis Urquhart, for a definitive response.)
Here, then, is Kasper’s original explanation of how communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, in the absence of an annulment declaring their previous marriage invalid, might be made available, and why:
The question that confronts us is this: Is this path beyond rigorism and laxity, the path of conversion, which issues forth in the sacrament of mercy—the sacrament of penance—also the path that we can follow in this matter? Certainly not in every case. But if a divorced and remarried person is truly sorry that he or she failed in the first marriage, if the commitments from the first marriage are clarified and a return is definitively out of the question, if he or she cannot undo the commitments that were assumed in the second civil marriage without new guilt, if he or she strives to the best of his or her abilities to live out the second civil marriage on the basis of faith and to raise their children in the faith, if he or she longs for the sacraments as a source of strength in his or her situation, do we then have to refuse or can we refuse him or her the sacrament of penance and communion, after a period of reorientation?
The path in question would not be a general solution. It is not a broad path for the great masses, but a narrow path for the indeed smaller segment of divorced and remarried individuals who are honestly interested in the sacraments. Is it not necessary precisely here to prevent something worse? For when children in the families of the divorced and remarried never see their parents go to the sacraments, then they too normally will not find their way to confession and communion. Do we then accept as a consequence that we will also lose the next generation and perhaps the generation after that? Does not our well-preserved praxis then become counterproductive?
In this passage and elsewhere, Kasper casts his proposal as above all a practical measure — a middle way between “rigorism” and “laxism,” a means of saving future generations for the church, a response to a reality that certain levels of spiritual and moral “heroism” are simply “not for the average Christian,” and a proposal that would be strictly limited to a very small “segment” of the divorced and remarried. The theological issues at stake, the potential conflict with the church’s traditional teaching, are consistently downplayed and/or brushed aside; the implication is always that we are talking about an exception that in no way threatens the official, gospel-grounded rule.
So let’s talk about the practicalities of that exception for a moment. It’s important to note that what Kasper is proposing differs from a scenario in which individual pastors might decide on their own initiative to give communion to the remarried, or where remarried Catholics who are morally convinced that their first marriages were invalid, but who haven’t managed to obtain an annulment, might decide to find a parish where they can act on that conviction and receive the eucharist. Both those possibilities already exist, insofar as the church is huge, diverse, complicated and neither a police state nor (as Kasper says) a community of perfectly heroic saints: The formal teaching barring the remarried from communion coexists, inevitably, with individual choices that contravene the rule, and in the Western world especially many Catholics looking for straightforward laxity can very easily find what they are seeking.
What Kasper is recommending is something different: Not a certain degree of tolerance for deviations from the rule, but formal permission to abandon it — granted by an official body of the church, with a papal imprimatur, and eventually with, presumably, a formal structure (say X prayers, wait X weeks, etc.) that individuals and pastors could follow and adopt.
So the first question to ask is why, once this new structure is in place, we should realistically expect it to be limited to “a smaller segment of divorced and remarried individuals,” rather than being extended to the “great masses” fairly quickly?
Consider that right now the church already has a procedure, the annulment process, that is effectively limited to people who have a stronger-than-average interest in receiving the sacraments after divorcing and marrying again. Suppose that you institute, alongside this procedure, a second path to reception of communion, which involves no paperwork, no tribunals, no difficult family issues or ex-spouse interactions, no long wait with an uncertain outcome at the end. The first, almost-inevitable consequence, it seems to me, would be that many, many people who might otherwise have done so would simply stop applying for annulments and follow this path instead. Yes, under Kasper’s proposals, second marriages still wouldn’t be blessed by the church, so there would be some Catholics seeking the validation of their second union who would go down the annulment path … but there would be a lot more (based on my own sense of what I might do in that position, frankly) who would say, “well, maybe someday, but for now it’s too much, too hard …” and take the Kasper door instead.
So annulment applications would largely collapse, and most people currently seeking them would simply turn to their local pastor for relief instead. Then at the same time, you would have a far larger population — as large, potentially, as the pool of divorced-and-remarried Catholics who currently show up at Christmas, Easter, and rarely in between — who would never really contemplate going through the annulment process as it currently exists, but who would see the new rubric as an alternative much better suited to their lives and situations. (Indeed, I would have assumed that the appeal to this “great mass” of semi-lapsed Catholics would represent a feature rather than a bug for advocates of Kasper’s proposal — a way to bring the lapsed and drifting home, to make it easier, as the cardinal suggests, to raise their children Catholic, to boost mass attendance and sacramental participation overall, and so on.)
Now in theory pastors could throw up obstacles to requests from this larger group, could work every case extremely carefully, and could substantially limit the number of people going down this path. (You may receive, a priest might say, but you seem insufficiently contrite about your first marriage’s failure and/or insufficiently sincere in your practice of faith, and so you may not …) But this places an awfully heavy burden on an already-burdened clergy, and it’s much more likely that the pattern with most post-1960s changes to traditional Catholic practice (from, say, the allowance for taking communion in the hand to the permission for cremation at Catholic funerals) would play itself out once again: A rhetoric of modesty and pastoral discretion and careful implementation, followed by a swift normalization (or near-universalization) of the new rule or approach. Not in every parish or diocese, no doubt, but in enough of them to establish a new pattern, a widespread and generally-accepted norm.
So by design, then, rather than by accident, Kasper’s approach would almost certainly create a situation in which almost all divorced Catholics could reasonably expect to be able to remarry and resume the reception of the eucharist with the formal blessing of the church. This would, as Kasper says, probably strengthen some Catholics’ attachment to the church and the sacraments, and give some Catholic children of remarried parents a stronger connection to the life of the faith than they have today. But it would also have other effects as well. Those children of the divorced and remarried that Kasper references would, indeed, be more likely to see their parents going to communion, but they would also be more likely to think that their church did not, in the end, regard marriage as actually as indissoluble, or the words of Jesus on the subject as actually as binding, as Roman Catholicism has heretofore believed and taught. And so would other Catholic married couples, and their children, and others, both within the church and without. (Especially since it’s very clear how such a change would be portrayed in media accounts, where the language of exceptional cases and narrow segments would be regarded — again, I think, correctly — as far less significant than the change itself.)
Right now, at least in the United States, there is still a “Catholic difference” on divorce: Overall, Catholic divorce rates are lower than the rates for the secular and for other religious groups; among couples who marry young, divorce rates among practicing Catholics are substantially lower than rates for other churchgoing Christians; and then among self-identified Catholics, sacramental marriages are much less likely to dissolve than non-sacramental, civil marriages. Would this difference survive the transformation in church practice that would likely follow the adoption of Kasper’s proposal, and the change in church teaching strongly implied (with, again, its implications amplified in the secular culture) by that proposal’s practical effects? Maybe: Social and religious trends are, yes, quite complicated and difficult to perfectly predict. But the record of similar changes in other Christian churches is not exactly encouraging on this count, and the “contagious” pattern of family breakdown likewise offers a reason to be sharply pessimistic.
So again sticking to practicalities rather than dogmatics, it’s worth asking a rather sharp question: what kind of increase in the Catholic divorce rate would advocates of Kasper’s proposal consider an acceptable cost to set against the benefit of bringing some remarried Catholics and their children back into the church?
*
Then there are the questions that follow from the underlying moral logic of the proposal, which would seem, in my reading at least, to have broader applications than Kasper’s modest language allows.
The argument, as offered, is that the church should hesitate before asking remarried Catholics who have made serious commitments to their new spouses and possibly to children to put those commitments at risk by trying to live chastely, and incur the guilt of obligations unmet and promises unfulfilled. Again, setting aside certain theological issues, one can concede this argument’s potency while wondering about its limiting principle. Why, for instance, would the obligations of a second marriage need to be accommodated by the church, and not the obligations of a polygamous marriage — where similar promises are made, and children are just as (if not more) likely to be involved?
Polygamy is not of course a major issue in Kasper’s Germany or in the United States (though cases certainly exist), but it is very much a major issue in Africa, the church’s more important mission field, and a continent where the definition of marriage is hotly contested, not between Christianity and liberalism, but between Christianity and Islam. Is there anything in Kasper’s proposal that would not imply the necessity — or at least the plausibility — of a similar accommodation for spouses in a vowed polygamous union? Indeed, surely women in polygamous marriages in traditional cultures are in a much more difficult position than men or women in a second marriage in the West — their legal rights more limited, their economic freedom more circumscribed, their ability to break away without losing contact with their children much more constrained. If the church does not ask “heroism” of remarried Catholics in rich countries, how can it possibly take a strong line against polygamy in contexts where, for someone already tied to such a union, trying to be faithful to the church’s teaching on marriage can exact a far, far higher cost?
This is not a slippery-slope argument; it’s just a straightforward application of the principle being invoked. The slippery-slope argument would encompass still other unions: For instance, if the church cannot reasonably call the divorced-and-remarried to continence, by what legitimate grounds can it call same-sex-attracted Catholics to that state — especially gay Catholics in same-sex unions who might be rearing children together, like the remarried couples Kasper invokes? If the church, in his words, can find a way to formally “tolerate” what is “in itself … unacceptable” in the case of a mode of living specifically condemned by Jesus himself, why can’t it similarly tolerate a mode of life that doesn’t involve adultery or the breaking of an existing marriage?
And then there is the further example that the cardinal himself seems to raise, in the following Commonweal exchange:
CWL: So, just to be clear, when you talk about a divorced and remarried Catholic not being able to fulfill the rigorist’s requirements without incurring a new guilt, what would he or she be guilty of?
Kasper: The breakup of the second family. If there are children you cannot do it. If you’re engaged to a new partner, you’ve given your word, and so it’s not possible.
Now perhaps (I would say probably) there is an English-as-second-language issue here, and Kasper meant “engaged” as in already civilly married, and not engaged as in merely affianced. But the latter example still raises an interesting point: In a society filled with cohabitation and de facto step-parenting and all the rest, many people make promises and incur obligations to their partners and children long before they enter into a civil marriage, and the “guilt” that Kasper wants to avoid imposing could be felt in many different situations. You can imagine a scenario, under his logic, where a pastor might feel obliged — because there are promises involved, or kids, or other obligations — to hesitate before insisting that a divorced, not-yet-remarried Catholic live chastely, or before urging him to break off his engagement rather than following through on his intention to marry again. And then of course beyond that the scenario of simple nonmarital cohabitation rears its head: If you have a child with a man, say, and he doesn’t want a Catholic wedding, or to marry at all, but is content to live with you and be a father to your children, under Kasper’s logic isn’t it better for the kids to have their dad around and to see you taking communion? If what Jesus calls adultery can be tolerable for the church, cannot some nonmarital pairings claim the same sort of mercy? But only a “small segment,” of course …
*
Now I know that for many readers, teasing out these implications makes Kasper’s proposal seem that much more reasonable and admirable, because in their view the Catholic Church desperately needs a way to evolve toward the norms of “sexual modernity” (on same-sex marriage, especially, but other fronts as well). And if this is the entering wedge for that kind of change, well, then so much the better.
That’s a perfectly understandable perspective (about which I hope to say more, in a slightly different form, soon). All I’m arguing here is that it needs to be forthrightly acknowledged, rather than hidden away as a kind of footnote to what is officially presented as a small pastoral change. That right or wrong, good or evil, merciful or destructive, the Kasper proposal is not a minor tweak to Catholic discipline: It’s a depth charge, a change pregnant with further changes, an alteration that could have far more sweeping consequences than innovations (married priests; female cardinals) that might seem more radical on their face.
For reasons of theology, sociology, and simple logic, admitting the remarried to communion has the potential to transform not only Catholic teaching and Catholic life, but the church’s very self-understanding. These are the real stakes in this controversy; these are the terms, here and in Rome, on which it needs to be debated.