Revisiting Remarriage
AMERICA
Mary Ann Walsh
The
Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, October
5-19 in Rome, addresses “The pastoral challenges for the family in the
context of evangelization.” It is preparation for the 2015 ordinary
synod and it’s time to address the situation of divorced and remarried
Catholics.
Statistics from the Center for Applied
Research in the Apostolate estimate that the United States is home to
4.5 million Catholics who are divorced and remarried sans annulment.
Church law bans them from the Eucharist, but the situation is confusing.
Some don’t know they’re not permitted to receive Communion. Others
wrongly think they’re denied Communion because they divorced, though the
ban is incurred only if the divorced person marries again without an
annulment since the church says the first marriage still exists.
Sorry is the plight of people whose children
receive first Communion but they can’t join them. Some exit at
Communion, when Mass ends for them. Some feel they serve a life sentence
for a youthful mistake.
Pope Francis’ emphasis on the church’s
pastoral nature offers hope, but no one should expect the church to
alter its teaching on the permanence of marriage. Still, the church must
face this issue.
Among the possibilities:
Streamline the cumbersome annulment
process. Sacramental marriage requires that the partners be ready,
willing and able to marry. Some individuals recognize there were
problems such as immaturity and pressure to marry that precluded a
sacramental marriage. The annulment process can help couples see why
their marriage failed. Yet annulments still have a bad reputation.
CARA estimates that only 15 percent of
Catholics who could avail themselves of the process actually do.
Suggested remedies: Instead of having witnesses testify as to what they
saw in another’s marriage, tribunal judges could accept what the people
seeking an annulment say. The process could skip the automatic appeal to
another court. To dismiss the canard that you can buy annulments, all
dioceses might stop charging for them. Once a tribunal grants an
annulment, a priest can bless the new marriage because no sacramental
marriage existed, though a civil marriage did.
Encourage more use of the internal
forum (not the external forum of church law). This process enables
individuals convinced that their first marriage was not sacramental to
approach Communion according to their own well-formed conscience. This
is not an annulment and does not involve blessing the current union, but
it acknowledges the primacy of conscience. It can be the answer for
people who cannot successfully pursue an annulment. The church strictly
reserves the internal forum to those who have unsuccessfully tried to
pursue an annulment, but can there be other options, for example, for a
battered spouse terrified of being in contact with the abuser? Might the
church be less strict? A confessor could assist someone in development
of a well-formed conscience so they can approach Communion if he or she
sincerely believes the first marriage was not sacramental and the second
one is. (Church practice holds that a priest who recommends this route
must call on the couple to live without conjugal relations.)
Consider the Orthodox churches’
solution. In these only the first wedding is considered sacramental: The
wedding psalms are joyful; the bride and groom are crowned and process
around the altar. When marriages fail, however, the Orthodox are open to
reviewing each case, granting a divorce with the possibility of
contracting a second or even a third, nonsacramental marriage. The
blessing of a second or third marriage differs. This allows
participation in the sacraments yet still affirms the permanence of the
first marriage.
Two concerns face the Synod fathers. One,
after so much consultation, they dare not do nothing. That would be akin
to what happened with the encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” when people
anticipated a change in church practice but got none. Some say this is
why today many Catholic women, according to pollsters, use artificial
means of contraception. Others claim this ultimately led to broader
rejection of church teaching. Two, the bishops cannot even suggest that
marriage is not permanent.
Now, working with the Spirit, the bishops
should find a way to comfort the pastorally afflicted and uphold the
permanence of sacramental marriage.
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