Lost Shepherd

by Philip F. Lawler

  Cardinal Sarah, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, minced no words in denouncing this manipulation of the Synod message. In a briefing with reporters, he said that “what has been published by the media about homosexual unions is an attempt to push the Church [to change] her doctrine.” Such reports were inaccurate, he said: “The Church has never judged homosexual persons, but homosexual behavior and homosexual unions are grave deviations of sexuality.”

  Sarah also called attention to the strong statement in the Synod’s interim report that the Catholic Church cannot accept “gender theory.” A native of Guinea, Sarah related that several African prelates had decried the common Western practice of making foreign aid contingent on developing nations’ acceptance of gender theory and other anti-family ideologies. This problem, he suggested, deserves wider attention.

  Cardinal Pell also wanted to dispel the notion that the Synod would advocate radical change in Church teaching on marriage. “We’re not giving in to the secular agenda; we’re not collapsing in a heap,” he insisted. “We’ve got no intention of following those radical elements in all the Christian churches, according to the Catholic churches in one or two countries, and going out of business.” The Australian added a pointed observation about the motives of those pushing for change:

  Communion for the divorced and remarried is for some—very few, certainly not the majority of synod fathers—it’s only the tip of the iceberg, it’s a stalking horse. They want wider changes, recognition of civil unions, recognition of homosexual unions.

  An Inconclusive Final Document

  After the stormy introduction of the relatio and the heated complaints about the manipulation of the message, the October 2014 meeting moved toward a relatively quiet conclusion, the bishops approving a final message that expressed appreciation for families and highlighted the struggles they face. Family life, the message stated, is “a mountainous trek with hardships and falls. God is always there to accompany us.” Unlike the controversial relatio, the final report included many references to Sacred Scripture and documents of the Magisterium.

  The Synod fathers had the opportunity to vote on each of the report’s sixty-two paragraphs, and the press office published the vote tallies for each paragraph. For example, paragraph 56, which stated that it is “totally unacceptable” that aid to poor nations be contingent upon legalization of same-sex marriage, passed by a 159-21 margin.

  Every paragraph in the final report received a majority vote, but three paragraphs failed to receive the required two-thirds supermajority. Paragraphs 52 and 53 stated that the Synod fathers disagreed about admitting remarried persons to Communion and that the issue required further study. Paragraph 55 stated that some families have persons with a homosexual orientation, that they are to be accepted with respect and sensitivity, and that same-sex unions are not remotely similar to marriage.

  Cardinal Burke called the final document “a significant improvement” over the interim report. “I would say that it provides an accurate, if not complete, summary of the discussions in the Synod Hall and in the small groups,” he told Catholic World Report. “It is a blow to those who wrote the material which did not reflect the Church’s teaching regarding the homosexual condition and homosexual acts, which implied that the Church wants now to relax its perennial teaching, and which tried to introduce material regarding so-called ‘same-sex unions’ into the discussion of Christian marriage.”

  In his concluding address to the Synod, the pope compared the two-week meeting to an arduous journey. Since it was “a journey of human beings, with the consolations there were also moments of desolation, of tensions and temptations, of which a few possibilities could be mentioned.”

  In mentioning those “possibilities,” the pope carefully balanced his remarks, warning “traditionalists” against “a temptation to hostile inflexibility” and “progressives and liberals” against a temptation to “a deceptive mercy that binds the wounds without first curing them.” He warned against “the temptation to neglect the ‘depositum fidei’ [the deposit of faith]” and “the temptation to neglect reality, making use of meticulous language and a language of smoothing to say so many things and to say nothing!”

  The final document of the 2014 Synod meeting received nowhere near the attention that the more radical relatio did. The earlier document, suggesting a major change in Church teaching, had admittedly been more newsworthy. But in the English-speaking world there was another reason why the preliminary report drew more attention. The official English translation of the bishops’ final document was not available until ten days after the Synod closed, when the bishops had gone home and the reporters covering the event had moved on to other subjects.

  Even then, the English translation had its defects, including one blatant omission. The bishops’ final statement, issued in Italian, noted that the Synod fathers came together to “discern how the Church and society can renew their commitment to the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman.” Those italicized words were omitted from the Vatican’s official English translation. No one who had witnessed the manipulation of the 2014 Synod meeting was likely to think that the omission was accidental.

  1 A decree of nullity, commonly called an “annulment,” is a finding by a Church tribunal that a putative marriage is not valid—that is, that there never was a marriage. A valid marriage can never be “dissolved.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Unanswered Question

  The ordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops that convened in October 2015 was mostly a reprise of the extraordinary assembly of a year earlier. The topic was the same—marriage and the family—and the same arguments were rehearsed, the same tensions exposed. But there were two important differences. First, complaints about manipulation of the proceedings subsided, perhaps because bishops were on the alert, ready to object to any suspicious stratagems. Second, and more important, this session would produce a final report that would in turn form the basis for an important magisterial document by Pope Francis.

  As a Synod meeting concludes, the bishops vote on a series of propositions. Those that are approved by a two-thirds majority constitute the final report of the Synod. But since the Synod is an advisory body, its report is not the last word. Rather, the pope summarizes the results of the discussion in an “apostolic exhortation,” an expression of the papal magisterium that carries a high (though not the highest) level of authority.

  At the 2014 meeting of the Synod, Francis had given many indications of his leanings but had not openly sided with the proponents of change. Although he had expressed his enthusiasm for Cardinal Kasper’s work, he had not endorsed the proposal to allow Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics. While he had appointed the officials who organized the meeting, he had not been directly involved in their shenanigans. So it was still possible to believe that the pope would accept the outcome of the bishops’ deliberations on the issue that had come to dominate the discussion.

  There had been some early signs, to be sure, that the pope would side with Kasper, to whom he had given the floor at the consistory of cardinals in February 2014. Then a few months later there were reports that the pope himself had advised a woman that she should receive Communion despite her divorce and remarriage.

  In April 2014 the Vatican confirmed that the pope had placed one of his surprise telephone calls to a woman in Argentina, Jaquelina Lisbona, who had written to him about her marital situation, pleading for permission to receive the Eucharist. Lisbona—who professed dismay at the international attention given to the story—told an Argentine radio station that while she is not divorced, her husband, Julio Sabetta, is divorced and remarried. Because their marriage is not recognized by the Church, Lisbona said, her pastor had told her that she is barred from the Sacraments.

  After the pope called her, Lisbona’s husband wrote on his Facebook page that the pontiff had told his wife “that she should go to confession and start taking Communion at a differ
ent parish.” In his second-hand account of the conversation, Sabetta claimed that the pope had assured his wife that “a divorced person who goes to Communion is not doing anything wrong.” (To be sure, the Church allows divorced Catholics to receive Communion—provided that they do not attempt a second marriage.)

  The Vatican press office indicated that it would not comment on the pope’s telephone call, emphasizing that reports about that conversation “cannot be confirmed as reliable.” In any case, the statement continued, the pope’s advice to an individual could not be regarded as a statement of Church teaching, since such conversations would “not in any way form part of the Pope’s public activities.” The Vatican statement added that “consequences relating to the teaching of the Church are not to be inferred from these occurrences.”

  Still the pope’s telephone conversation raised disturbing questions. Did he really dispense pastoral advice—in a case that he could not possibly have known well—over an international telephone line? Did he really tell a woman that she should receive Communion in spite of her involvement in a marriage that the Church could not sanction? While a prudent reader might ordinarily question the accuracy of such an account, Francis had made so many unexpected phone calls and unconventional statements that this conversation, as reported, seemed quite plausible.

  Questions about the pope’s thinking swirled around the preparations for the second Synod session, feeding suspicions that he was determined to secure the bishops’ approval of the Kasper proposal. The speculation was heightened when the pope invoked the “principles of gradualness,” language that some had employed to justify a change in Church teaching. John Paul II had used that term in 1981 in his own apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio. Acknowledging that many people will make only gradual progress toward a life of virtue, the Polish pope had nevertheless clearly indicated that pastors should not shy away from a clear statement of Church teachings:

  They cannot however look on the law as merely an ideal to be achieved in the future: they must consider it as a command of Christ the Lord to overcome difficulties with constancy. And so what is known as “the law of gradualness” or step-by-step advance cannot be identified with “gradualness of the law,” as if there were different degrees or forms of precept in God’s law for different individuals and situations.

  If “gradualness” means “meeting people where they are” and opening a conversation that might lead them to Christ, then it is not only a prudent approach but a pastoral necessity. But advocates for the Kasper proposal seemed to suggest something different: a willingness to tolerate sin, to pretend that a wound is a sign of health. Father Vincent Twomey, a prominent Irish theologian who studied for his doctorate under Joseph Ratzinger, has remarked that this approach is neither bold nor properly pastoral: “There is nothing very courageous about offering ‘pastoral’ recommendations that fail to challenge a world that still bears the scars of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.”

  Streamlined Annulment Procedures

  Even before the Synod fathers convened in October 2015 for their second round of discussions on the family, it seemed possible that the pope might take the most contentious issue—the Kasper proposal—off the table by making it easier to obtain a decree of nullity.

  Some Catholic couples whose unions have broken down have never been truly married in the eyes of the Church. A canonical decree acknowledging that their supposed marriage is not valid leaves them free to remarry (or, in the eyes of the Church, to marry for a first time) and still to receive Communion. If marriage tribunals operated as efficiently as one might wish, granting relief promptly and without burdensome expense to those who qualified, then the Kasper proposal might be moot.

  Early in September, just a few weeks before the Synod met, Francis announced changes to the Code of Canon Law streamlining the procedure for annulments. He explained that he was motivated by the desire to help those Catholics who “are too often separated from the legal structures of the churches due to physical or moral distance” and recalled that such reforms were frequently mentioned during the October 2014 discussions of the Synod.

  These reforms, the pope emphasized, do not alter the Church’s clear teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. The canonical changes, he noted, are “provisions that favor not the nullity of marriage but rather the speed of processes, along with the appropriate simplicity, so that the heart of the faithful who await clarification of their status is not long oppressed by the darkness of doubt due to the lengthy wait for a conclusion.”

  The principal reforms were:

  •The elimination of fees for annulment petitions. The costs were now to be borne by the diocese.

  •The elimination of a mandatory review for every judgment of nullity. The “moral certainty reached by the first judge according to law should be sufficient.”

  •The option for having cases heard by a single judge appointed by the bishop, rather than a court of three judges.

  •An accelerated process for cases in which the evidence appears clear that a sacramental marriage never took place.

  These changes, which took effect in December 2015, would have little practical effect on Catholics in the United States, the country that accounts for nearly half of the annulments handed down by Church tribunals worldwide. Though the new “fast-track” option would benefit those who qualified for it, most American Catholics already had easy access to marriage tribunals, and many dioceses had already waived the fees associated with a petition for annulment. Nevertheless, the reforms were expected to affect the discussions of the Synod. As John Allen predicted,

  The decision will recalibrate the discussion at October’s second edition of the Synod of Bishops on the family, likely reducing the emphasis on the question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics and creating space for other issues to emerge.

  The streamlined annulment procedure eliminated one argument for the Kasper proposal—namely, that many Catholics, particularly in impoverished dioceses, did not have access to marriage tribunals. The reforms also responded to the call, originally made by Benedict XVI, for more ways to bring the divorced and remarried back into active involvement in Church life.

  An annulment is not a favor granted by Church officials. A “declaration of nullity,” as it is properly called, is a juridical finding that a particular union has never been a valid marriage. If there is no marriage, then as a matter of justice the Church should reach that verdict as quickly as practicable so the man and woman know they are free to enter new unions.

  Unfortunately, as the Synod fathers observed, in many parts of the world Catholics do not have ready access to marriage tribunals. Even where tribunals operate with reasonable efficiency, the process can be cumbersome and costly. So an easy consensus emerged from the previous Synod sessions that the annulment process should be streamlined.

  Now Francis had swept away those difficulties. The process had been simplified, and the costs (to petitioners) had been eliminated. In cases where there were obvious grounds for annulment, the diocesan bishop could quickly issue a verdict. Once the papal reforms were in place, it should be easy—too easy, critics feared—for Catholic couples to obtain a declaration of nullity.

  With their first unions annulled and their new marriages regularized, thousands of Catholic couples would be welcome to receive the Eucharist. So who would be left as potential beneficiaries of the Kasper proposal? Only those who could not receive annulments because they were truly married the first time. And it seemed clearly impossible to accept those couples back into the full sacramental life of the Church—and thus to accept their second unions—without rejecting the words of Jesus.

  October 4—the opening day of the 2015 Synod meeting—was the twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time in the Church’s liturgical calendar. The Gospel that Catholics all around the world heard proclaimed at Mass that day, taken from the tenth chapter of St. Mark, seemed uncannily apt:

  And Pharisees came up and in order to tes
t him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”

  He answered them, “What did Moses command you?”

  They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.”

  But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.

  “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’

  ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh.

  “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

  And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter.

  And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

  Demonizing the Critics

  When the Synod opened its deliberations, acrimony was aired less freely than in the earlier session but it was still felt. The pope renewed his call for free and open debate, but liberal Catholic pundits hinted that anyone who opposed the Kasper proposal was defying the pontiff. The German-speaking bishops issued assurances that no one contemplated a change in Church teaching, but when conservatives said that the Church must not change her teaching, they were denounced as “Pharisees”—one of the strongest epithets in the progressive churchman’s lexicon. Vatican spokesmen dismissed “conspiracy theories” about manipulation of the Synod, but bishops who argued against potentially revolutionary changes were charged with forming a cabal. The most unseemly aspect of the 2015 Synod meeting was not the lively argument but the aggressive effort by a cadre of ideologues to depict their opponents as villains.