In recent years Pope Benedict XVI has been overseeing the publication of his
opera omnia,
or collected works. Assisted by the current prefect of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Benedict
is republishing, under the name Joseph Ratzinger, all his theological
writings, nine volumes of which have been issued so far (in German, by
Verlag Herder). The
most recent volume contains a 1972 essay, on the indissolubility of marriage, whose conclusion Benedict
has seen fit to rewrite .
The original essay, written when Ratzinger was a forty-five-year-old
professor of theology at Regensburg, had proposed that divorced and
civilly remarried Catholics be allowed to return to Communion in some
circumstances. In an important change, that proposal is conspicuously
missing from the newly rewritten conclusion.
The original conclusion acknowledged both that the
church is “of the New Covenant” and that it remains “in a world in which
there continues to exist unchanged ‘the hardness of heart’ (Matthew
19:8)” of prior times. And so church practice “must begin in the
concrete”—taking into account the damage done, even by the church
itself, through such “hardness of heart.” Specifically, with regard to
Scripture’s clear teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, Ratzinger
in 1972 concluded that, in some second marriages, it would be “immoral”
to demand separation as a condition for allowing the spouses to return
to Communion. “When the second marriage produces moral obligations with
regard to the children, the family, and even the wife and there are no
analogous obligations stemming from the first marriage,” Ratzinger
wrote, “openness to eucharistic Communion, after a trial period,
certainly seems to be just and fully in line with the tradition of the
church.”
The new, rewritten conclusion retains the original
essay’s observation about our human hardness of heart, but proceeds to
note that we are in a new “concrete” situation—and then asks a question
Ratzinger did not ask forty-three years ago: “So what can be done
concretely, especially at a time in which the faith is being watered
down more and more, even within the church?” Times have changed,
Benedict seems to be saying, and readmission to the sacraments is no
longer an option. Instead he recommends that divorced Catholics who have
civilly remarried be offered “intense spiritual communion with the
Lord,” including a blessing at Sunday Mass when they “approach the altar
with their hands folded over their chests.” Spiritual communion, yes;
sacramental communion, no.
Times may indeed have changed since 1972—but have they
changed so radically as to invalidate the earlier essay’s conclusion?
That earlier essay had appealed to such Church Fathers as Origen, St.
Basil, and St. Augustine to argue both that the indissolubility of marriage has been “definitive” church doctrine from the beginning and
that “within the ideal that is in fact determinative for the church,
there was evidently again and again in the concrete pastoral application
a more elastic practice.” For remarried Christians that more “elastic
practice” included, in some cases, returning to the sacraments.
The original essay’s concluding paragraph began by
restating the “irrevocable” nature of marital consent, then added: “This
does not rule out that the eucharistic Communion of the church should
also embrace persons who recognize this doctrine and this principle of
life but find themselves in an emergency situation of a special nature
in which they have particular need for full communion with the Body of
the Lord.” In its final sentence the essay called this twofold claim a
“sign of contradiction that will remain in the church’s faith.” Indeed
this sign of contradiction is “essential” to the church, Ratzinger
argued, whose Lord “proclaimed to his disciples that they must not
presume to be above their master, who was rejected by the pious and the
liberal.”
WHY DID HE change his mind? There is a complicated back
story to Benedict’s revision, one containing some theological and
ecclesial infighting. Last February the 1972 article by Ratzinger was
cited—approvingly—by Cardinal Walter Kasper
in his introductory remarks
to the consistory of cardinals convened by Pope Francis to discuss the
issue of the family, preparatory to last fall’s synod; in affirming his
view that the divorced and remarried should be admitted to Communion,
Kasper cited Ratzinger’s essay as offering “an appropriate solution” to
the dilemma. Yet that 1972 article was the first and only time Ratzinger
ever took such a position publicly. Thereafter he reverted to the
traditional ban on Communion, and actually helped strengthen it when, as
prefect of the CDF, he signed the September 1994 letter to the bishops
in which the Holy See rejected the more liberal position staked out by
certain bishops—including Kasper. Apparently Ratzinger’s dissatisfaction
at Kasper’s use of his essay last year led to his decision to recast
its conclusion in his collected works.
It is, in the view of many, an unfortunate alteration, a
diminution of the vision of faith put forth in the earlier essay’s
conclusion. In sum, for Ratzinger forty-three years ago, a willingness
to live within the tension between a definitive doctrinal claim and a
pastoral duty to embrace those of “particular need” was not a
contradiction needing to be ironed out, but rather a sign of
discipleship. This willingness is missing from the new conclusion, which
dissolves that “essential contradiction” by dropping a pastoral embrace
in favor of a definitive doctrine. Effectively, Benedict forgets what
his earlier essay held as fundamental.
Such forgetting finds a sharp challenge in an idea first
expressed by German Catholic theologian Johannes Metz in 1977, just a
few years after Ratzinger’s original essay. Metz said that at the center
of Christianity stands the “dangerous memory” of the death and
resurrection of Jesus, with its promise of the coming Kingdom of God (
Faith in History and Society ).
We must cultivate this dangerous memory to overcome any temptation to
“bathe everything from the past in a soft, conciliatory light,” Metz
insisted, and instead allow the past to “reveal new and dangerous
insights for the present.” What we need is a fuller memory of the past,
but Benedict’s rewritten conclusion moves in the opposite direction; it
forgets what is difficult about the past and thus avoids “dangerous
insights for the present.”
I HAVE HAD MY own reasons to revisit the past of late.
My eighty-two-year-old mother has recently taken to telling me and my
siblings stories that we had not heard before—difficult stories about
her life growing up in Boston. In October, she and I flew from Minnesota
to visit her last remaining brother, then eighty-eight and living with
advanced dementia in a Boston nursing home. On the flight, my mother
told me of a phone conversation she’d had with her brother a few years
before, when he was still conversational. “Was our childhood as bad as I
remember it?” she had asked her brother. “Worse,” he replied. At the
nursing home my uncle did not speak, but smiled in what seemed to be
wordless recognition of my mother. The visit turned out to be their
last; he died three weeks later.
These events have further opened the floodgates for my
mother, increasing her desire to look back and understand dangerous
memories from her early life. They center around the difficulties
created by her mother’s alcoholism, divorce, and remarriage. One memory
concerns another family who would help on Sundays by taking my mother to
church with them. “My mother wasn’t allowed inside the church, divorcée
that she was,” my mother recalled. “The other family would not
physically step into our house, but would honk their car horn from our
driveway to let me know it was time to come with them.” Another memory
concerned one of her grade-school teachers—in her Catholic school—who
from time to time would instruct her to stand so the rest of the class
could “see what the child of a divorcée looks like.”
My mother does not in the least lay her life’s challenges at the feet of the church. Her
mother’s alcoholism interrupted her early life more than the church’s
teaching about divorce and remarriage, and the consolation and hope my
mother has received from decades of active membership in the church far
outweigh the suffering. Still, her difficult stories were fresh in my
mind and heart when I read Benedict’s revised conclusion—and when a
colleague shared with me some of her own memories of being a
Catholic-school seventh-grader, in the early 1960s. After suffering many
years of spousal abuse, my colleague’s mother had gotten up the courage
to divorce her husband. Word had apparently gotten out, and “I was
called out of class one morning,” my colleague recalled, “and told that
the pastor wanted to see me. Monsignor was in the office and told me
that my mother would go to hell, unless I talked her out of getting
divorced.”
My colleague was so overwhelmed by that visit that she
remained silent about it for years. When she finally did tell her
mother, she learned that the monsignor had phoned her those many years
before with the same message—reminding her, over the telephone, that she
was a sinner, was not welcome to Communion, and would certainly end up
in hell if she failed to raise her children in the Catholic faith.
My colleague’s mother eventually remarried, and for
years she and her husband brought her children to Sunday Mass and
remained in the pew while the children went to Communion. This woman
apologized for the rest of her life for “leaving” the church; in her
sixties and dying, this divorced and remarried woman wrote a letter to
her own mother (who outlived her) that included the following sentence:
“Please tell me that you understand what I did, and that you hope we
will meet again in heaven.”
These stories have something to say to any of us wanting
to take seriously the sign of contradiction, the dangerous memory of
the death and resurrection of Jesus. Not to allow such stories into our
lives is a failure of compassion. In his fine essay on Johannes Metz and
"dangerous memories,"
Michael J. Iafrate cites Metz's reminder that compassion literally means a “willingness to suffer the sufferings of others.”
* I
am not suggesting that Pope Benedict lacks compassion. But I am
suggesting that something is missing from his account of the
past—namely, that tension he earlier called essential to church faith.
His new conclusion comes, he writes, “at a time in which the faith is
being watered down more and more”; but in my view it is not adequate to
what is being asked of us now. What we need is not to drop the
“essential contradiction” he referred to in 1972, but to learn how to
live with it, and in it, together.
In fact, Pope Francis seems now to be asking precisely
this of us. At the end of October’s first installment of the two-part
Synod on the Family, he asked all present to open themselves to a year
of “true spiritual discernment,” so that when the synod reconvenes next
October it can “find concrete solutions to so many difficulties and
innumerable challenges that families must confront.”
How do we achieve such discernment? In his 2011 book Katholische Kirche: Wesen, Wirklichkeit, Sendung,
Cardinal Walter Kasper—appropriately enough—named three rules for
discerning the movement of the Spirit in the church. I find the one
Kasper calls “ecclesiological” especially timely. “The Spirit is a
Spirit of unity,” he writes. “The Spirit does not divide, but brings
together and orders charisms within the church into a whole....
Prophetic speech must serve the building up of the community.” This rule
sounds very much like Ratzinger’s 1972 concern that we attend to those
in emergency situations who “have a particular need for full communion
with the Body of the Lord.”
Might not opening ourselves to hear the stories of
people whose lives have been deeply affected by church pastoral practice
around divorce and remarriage help us understand what true communion
might be? Might it not assist us in learning how to build up the
community—and so contribute to the year of true spiritual discernment
that Francis recommends?
* An earlier version of this essay did not
include the citation of Michael J. Iafrate's "'We Will Never Forget':
Metz, Memory, and the Dangerous Spirituality of Post-9/11 America (Part
II)," which appeared in September 2009 at Vox Nova . This essay has since been revised to reflect the inclusion of the citation.
No comments:
Post a Comment