Lost Shepherd

by Philip F. Lawler

  The “Kasper Proposal” Tops the Agenda

  This suggestion, which came to be known as the “Kasper proposal,” strikes at the heart of two essential Catholic teachings. First, since the earliest days of Christianity, the Church has taught that anyone who receives the Eucharist while in a state of grave sin commits another grave sin of sacrilege. St. Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the Body and Blood of the Lord” (11:27–28). Second, the Church has always taught that anyone who remarries while his spouse from a valid marriage is still alive is living in a state of grave sin.1 This discipline is based not on an arbitrary rule but on the clear words of Jesus himself: “But I say to you that every one who divorces his wife, except on the grounds of unchastity, makes her an adulteress, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5:32).

  Francis opened the February 2014 consistory—his first meeting with the full College of Cardinals since his election nearly a year earlier—by underlining the Church’s teaching that the family, based on marriage, is “the fundamental cell of human society.” Observing that in our era the family “is regarded with disdain and maltreated,” he urged Church leaders to work to restore the “recognition of how beautiful, true, and good it is to form a family.” Then he introduced Cardinal Kasper, who spoke for nearly two hours, taking up almost all of a morning session.

  Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office, told reporters that Kasper’s remarks were intended for the cardinals and would not be made public, but he did provide a brief summary of the talk. Kasper’s thoughts were very much “in harmony” with those of Francis, Lombardi said, and emphasized the role of the family as a domestic church and as an instrument for evangelization. Kasper had spoken about the understanding of marriage and family in Christian theology: established at creation, damaged by sin, but raised to the level of a sacrament and redeemed by grace. Lombardi confirmed that Cardinal Kasper did broach the subject that had commanded much media attention: the status of Catholics who are divorced and remarried. Without providing details of the cardinal’s thoughts, Lombardi said that Kasper had invoked Benedict XVI, who had urged greater pastoral care for Catholics in these situations, and Francis, who had said that the question of pastoral care should not be seen as in opposition to the canonical question of the validity of a marriage. Kasper closed his address, Lombardi said, by speaking of the “law of gradualness,” exploring how married couples could come eventually to a deeper understanding of their sacramental bond and a better appreciation for their family life.

  Andrea Tornielli provided a more detailed account of Kasper’s speech. Based on reports from cardinals who were in attendance, Tornielli said that Kasper had challenged the prelates to address the problem of Catholics who are divorced and remarried. The Church cannot change her doctrine regarding the indissolubility of marriage, the cardinal said. But pastors can and should find ways to reach out to Catholics in irregular marriages. He stressed that no situation is too difficult to allow for God’s mercy.

  Tornielli also reported that Kasper had expressed misgivings about proposals to ease access to the Church tribunals that issue annulments, fearing that a streamlined annulment process would lead to fresh complaints that the Church was accommodating a hypocritical sort of “Catholic divorce.” But he asked whether it might be possible to allow for some sort of penitential process by which Catholics who are divorced and remarried could be reconciled with the Church, just as the early Church provided a penitential process to allow the re-entry of those who had renounced their faith to escape persecution.

  Another German, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the archbishop of Munich and Freising, quickly suggested that the Kasper proposal should be made public. He noted that Francis had applauded the presentation, saying that Kasper had raised “profound” issues. Moreover, some two hundred copies of the speech were already in circulation, having been distributed to the cardinals at the consistory, so it was inevitable that its content should become public.

  In early March, Kasper announced in a Vatican Radio interview that he would indeed make his thoughts public in a book to be published in German and Italian. This project had the approval of the pope, he said, who “wanted an open discussion about an urgent problem.” “I maintain the full teaching of the Church,” he assured his interviewer, “but the teaching has to be applied to concrete situations.” The Church must find ways “to help, support, and encourage” divorced and remarried Catholics, and his own suggestion was an attempt to do so while avoiding both “rigorism” and “laxism.”

  What the World Needed to Hear

  As it became apparent that the Kasper proposal would be a primary topic for the extraordinary Synod meeting in October, defenders of the traditional Church teaching mobilized. In the United States, Ignatius Press rushed out three books, including a volume of essays by prominent scholars and prelates directly rebutting the Kasper proposal. (The publication of this book would occasion a brief but revealing dispute at the Synod meeting, as I explain below.) Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American who then served as prefect for the Apostolic Signatura, the highest canonical court, took the lead in critiquing the Kasper proposal, telling an Irish audience that its adoption would “constitute a change in Church teaching, which is impossible.” He went on to say that it was “outrageous” to suggest that criticism of the Kasper proposal was really criticism of Pope Francis.

  Outrageous or not, the world’s media outlets spread the word that Francis was seeking a change in Church teaching—or at the least a dramatic change in discipline—as the October meeting approached. By the time the bishops assembled in Rome, the Kasper proposal had come to dominate public discussion.

  The disproportionate attention paid to this one proposal, regardless of its merits, revealed a serious imbalance in the Synod’s approach. At a time when marriage and the family were under unprecedented attack—a crisis threatening our entire civilization—the bishops of the Catholic world appeared fixated on a nicety of Church law. Worse, by concentrating on this debate they squandered an opportunity to deliver the one message that our society most desperately needs to hear.

  As the Synod fathers were opening their discussions in Rome, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would not hear appeals of lower-court decisions that had overturned state marriage laws. The result of those decisions was that the very term “marriage” had an entirely new legal meaning in thirty states, while the remaining twenty states (for the time being) held to the traditional definition. American society no longer had a common understanding of what marriage is.

  Americans were not alone in their confusion. All around the Western world, politicians and jurists were directing the public to accept same-sex unions—which only a decade or two ago were universally recognized as disordered—as equal to male-female marriages.

  Ideas have consequences, and so it should be no surprise that as we lost our theoretical understanding of what constitutes real marriage we also lost our practical ability to hold marriages together. The widespread acceptance of divorce—as a common occurrence, not just a last resort in exceptional circumstances—was the first sign of that failure. But the problem grew dramatically with the adoption of “no-fault” divorce laws, which made it possible for one party to sever a marriage contract. As the political scientist Stephen Baskerville has observed, “Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family.” By making the permanent contract of marriage terminable at will, the state actually redefined marriage about fifty years ago.

  Baskerville has rightly complained that “the churches have never raised their voices against the state’s usurpation of power” in redefining marriage through divorce laws, and the Synod of Bishops would do nothing to change that when it met in 2014 and 2015. The problem of easy divorce never came up.

  Real marriage requires real commitment. Over the past g
eneration the West has seen a spectacular rise in the number of couples who prefer to live together without marrying: acting like spouses but declining to make a commitment. These are unstable unions, and intentionally so: either partner can leave at any time to form another relationship. At the same time, the rate of out-of-wedlock birth has skyrocketed. Today the rate of illegitimacy among all newborn American babies is over 40 percent.

  Divorce and illegitimacy have produced an unprecedented situation in which most children, in the United States and in many European countries, are not living in households headed by their married parents. These children will face many handicaps in life, including the lack of models who might help them to build stable, lasting marriages of their own. There is no more certain recipe for a dysfunctional society than a population dominated by the children of broken homes. And that is what we now have.

  Yet for some revolutionary thinkers, that is not enough. “Gender ideology”—the notion that one’s sexual identity is entirely a matter of one’s own choice—is rapidly gaining influence in the schools. This bizarre ideology, now worming its way into primary schools, subverts any understanding that men and women, fathers and mothers, are distinguishable—any notion that the family matters at all.

  Assessing the gravity of the crisis, Msgr. Cormac Burke writes:

  While not pessimistic by nature, I must say that we are blinking at reality if we do not face up to the fact that since the 1950s, marriage and the family, outside and inside the Church, have been plunged into an ever-growing crisis—to the extent that their nature, and very existence, are threatened by total collapse.

  A longtime judge of the Roman Rota, the Church’s highest appellate court, Msgr. Burke has as much experience evaluating shattered marriages as anyone. “If I had to sum up the causes of this crisis in one factor,” he writes, “it would be this: marriage is no longer approached as a family enterprise. It has become basically a ‘you-and-me’ affair” [His emphasis].

  Real marriage has three essential characteristics: it is faithful, fruitful, and for life. Burke’s analysis points us toward the second of these characteristics. If a couple enter into a union intent only on satisfying their own needs and desires, they are missing a vital ingredient: the orientation toward children. Thus we arrive at the great secret of Catholic teaching on marriage: the need to be open to life.

  In the explosion of protest that greeted Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical reaffirming the Church’s traditional condemnation of artificial contraception, most Catholic leaders ran for cover, abandoning the public defense of the link between marriage and children. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal just a few months before the Synod convened in 2014, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan confessed that the Catholic hierarchy had missed a crucial opportunity by failing to take up the message of Humanae Vitae: “We forfeited the chance to be a coherent moral voice when it comes to one of the more burning issues of the day.”

  Today the burning issue is: What constitutes marriage? If that question is answered incorrectly, healthy family life becomes the exception rather than the rule. Without healthy families, our civilization is doomed.

  The only institution that can lead the recovery of a proper understanding of marriage and the family is the Church. But the Synod of Bishops chose to focus on how to accommodate divorced and remarried Catholics rather than on why so many Catholics no longer understand the indissolubility of marriage or even the authority of the Ten Commandments.

  As critical as it is to defend the integrity of the family, the Catholic Church goes even further in teaching that a sacramental marriage is a reflection of God’s love for his people; the Church is the Bride of Christ. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, “The sacrament of matrimony signifies the union of Christ and his Church.” Any suggestion, therefore, that the marital bond may be broken or somehow fade away implies that Christ’s love for the Church might also lapse.

  Transparency in Theory, Manipulation in Fact

  Even before the Synod fathers arrived in Rome at the start of October 2014, everyone knew that the proceedings would revolve around one central question: Would the pope and his favorite theologian be able to overcome the resistance of the Vatican’s old guard and drive through a change in the Church’s practice regarding marriage and divorce? It remained to be seen whether this contest would take place on an even playing field.

  In his address to the bishops on their first day of discussions, the pope seemed to indicate that it would. He urged the Synod fathers to speak out boldly, “without human respect, without timidity.” The secretary general of the Synod, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, echoed that message, declaring that “discussion at the Synod is to be open.” The reality, however, was dramatically different. The Synod meeting of October 2014 was far less transparent than previous sessions.

  In the past, reporters had been allowed to attend the working sessions. The bishops’ addresses were translated into several languages and made public. The talks may have been long and dry; the discussion may have been disjointed. But anyone who wanted to know what was happening at the Synod could easily find a full record of the proceedings.

  For this session, though, the Vatican press office provided only a short summary of the day’s proceedings. The arguments that took up several hours were compressed into a few paragraphs. A few direct quotations might be included in the summaries, but the speakers were not identified. Which prelates made which points? Observers could only guess.

  These summaries ensured that the outside world heard nothing about the Synod that was not filtered through the Vatican press office. If the officials who prepared the summaries did not find an argument worthy of mention, no one ever heard about it. Rather than being instructed by the Synod fathers themselves, journalists were being instructed by the press office.

  Such censorship nearly always backfires, however. There are always leaks. There are always enterprising reporters looking for inside information and sources ready to supply it. When everything is on the record, honest reporters can sort through the arguments and rebuttals, note the identity of the key participants in the debate, and reach logical conclusions about the trends of the discussion. When information is at a premium, however, insiders can advance their particular agendas by playing up their own arguments and casting their opponents in an unfavorable light.

  Synod officials said the restrictions were intended to encourage candor. If the sessions were closed, they reasoned, bishops would not feel inhibited about speaking plainly. With no reporters in the audience, they could be blunt, confident that their disputes would not be splashed across the next day’s headlines.

  But what harm would there be in the world’s seeing Catholic bishops in a heated debate? Why not let the differences of opinion—which everyone knew about—be a matter of public record?

  Cardinal Gerhard Müller of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had argued for a more open approach. “All Christians have the right to be informed about the interventions by their bishops,” he said. Those who followed the Synod debates could learn from the bishops’ disagreements, gaining a deeper understanding of the issues.

  Despite the official secrecy, highly colored accounts of the proceedings began to appear in the mass media. As the Synod fathers wondered which of their colleagues might have been sources, the atmosphere of trust began to deteriorate. Robert Royal, an American Catholic writer and commentator who had covered several previous Synod meetings, reported that the atmosphere in Rome was unusually tense, the comments heard in cafes often bitter, sometimes shockingly nasty.

  The tension and even bitterness were aggravated, at least in the more conservative circles, by a glaring double standard in the calls for an open, unfettered discussion. Cardinal Burke, a model of speaking “without human respect, without timidity,” was the object of rumors—which proved to be accurate—that the pope was about to signal his disfavor by removing him from his influential post as the head of the Apostoli
c Signatura and consigning him to a less important position. Meanwhile Cardinal Kasper was ubiquitous in the media, promoting his argument that the Church should allow Catholics who are divorced and remarried to receive Communion. Reliable sources revealed that Cardinal Müller, whose job was to safeguard Catholic doctrine, had been told that he must not promote a book in which he criticized the Kasper proposal.

  The Mystery of the Purloined Volumes

  Müller was one of the five cardinals who contributed chapters to the book Remaining in the Truth of Christ, in which an array of scholars argued that the Kasper proposal was incompatible with the teaching and pastoral practice of the Church. Father Robert Dodaro, an American patristics scholar in Rome, worked closely with Cardinal Burke in assembling the volume, which was published by Ignatius Press of San Francisco, led by the Jesuit priest Joseph Fessio.

  Hoping to shed some light on the Synod’s discussions in October, Father Fessio sought to put advance copies of the book into the hands of the participants. Many of them were staying at the Vatican’s St. Martha residence, but others had found their own accommodations, and those who were full-time residents of Rome would commute to the meetings from their own apartments. The office of the Synod had local addresses for all the participants but refused to release that list.

  With the addresses it was able to find on its own, Ignatius Press sent copies of the book to as many of the Synod fathers as it could. Some copies were hand-delivered to bishops staying at the St. Martha residence, while others were mailed to apartments in Rome or to the seminaries and other residences where participants were known to be lodging. But there were still scores of bishops whose temporary addresses the publisher could not find.

  Father Fessio’s team eventually decided to mail a book to each participating bishop in care of the Synod office. Dropped at an Italian post office in Rome, the packages were relayed (none too quickly, as is typical of Italian mail service) to the Vatican’s own post office. Some of the bulky envelopes made their way into the temporary mailboxes that had been set up for the Synod participants. Then, mysteriously, they disappeared.