Tuesday, November 29, 2005
"There is not, in fact, an easy solution"
By saying this, Cardinal Walter Kasper, somewhere in the St Blogodrome, is being vilified as a heretic.
It matters not that the Cardinal said this:
If we want to remain faithful to Jesus' words, we can only say that, when a marriage has been contracted with sacramental value, while the spouse lives there cannot be a second sacramental marriage recognized by the Church. The civil marriage of a divorced person is, objectively, in contradiction with Jesus' teachings.
Because he also said this:
There are, however, complex cases from the pastoral point of view, for example, when the first marriage, despite its validity, was entered into in a superficial way and, in the end, fails, while the second is lived in a consciously Christian manner and is happy and harmonious. In such situations, certainly impossible in themselves, some Greek Fathers of the Church have recommended the exercise of indulgence. In 1972, the then professor Joseph Ratzinger interpreted such affirmations by way of example. The Council of Trent kept to the most rigid Latin tradition, but without rejecting outright the more mild response of the Greek Orthodox Church.
Yet that is exactly the point for Catholic rigorists among us. Some people only want the easy solutions: one answer fits all. Some seem to lack the appreciation for the finer points of the application of theology, for pastoral judgment, or even compassion. I'm pleased to be in the same company of Kasper and Ratzinger in stating that perhaps the East has some wisdom what will permit us a response, or at least more reflection on the situation. But the experience of good second marriages: are these all to be denied as patently deceptive? Is not the lived witness of a second marriage worthy of consideration?
It is true that one must not move away arbitrarily from the ecclesial discipline, but [the experts] make possible a serious theological reflection. This reflection has nothing to do with the sensational newspaper headlines, which only create confusion and arouse false expectations which then end in disappointment. Precisely in the situation in which we find ourselves, the Church would not serve any one if it moved away from Jesus' clear teaching.
Kasper alludes to the Italian press which latched onto his original remarks about divorce and remarriage and ignoring all other content at the press conference at which this "news" was broken.
What's been lacking from this discussion, of course, is the situation in which a person who refuses to give up a second marriage is denied initiation because of a valid first marriage, even while being a non-Catholic. That's a tough one to explain to people.
