Organizing Burke's Resistance Movement

Resistance is mounting, indeed is being pro-actively organized, to Pope Francis and his program of mercy as Catholics of a more conservative stripe are making it clear that they do not want to see our co-religionists who are not married according to Catholic law or who are living in irregular unions admitted to the sacraments.  After last October’s Extraordinary Synod where the subject was discussed, Cardinal Raymond Burke, a persistent critic of the Pope, pledged to “resist” Pope Francis should there be any change in the current practice which requires divorced persons to obtain a Church annulment before they can enter a second union.   Pope Francis, or rather his “front man” Cardinal Walter Kasper, has spoken of introducing a process similar to the Orthodox Churches where divorced persons can acknowledge their fault in a marriage’s failure, do penance for their role in the marriage’s collapse, and then have their second marriage blessed—albeit it in a more somber rite that distinguishes it from the sacramental first marriage.  

Nearly 500 priests, Secular and Religious, from England and Wales signed the following letter to the English Catholic newspaper, The Herald, urging the participants in the upcoming Synod on the Family (Part II) this October to maintain the current discipline that excludes the divorced and remarried from the reception of the sacraments. 

SIR – Following the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2014 much confusion has arisen concerning Catholic moral teaching. In this situation we wish, as Catholic priests, to re-state our unwavering fidelity to the traditional doctrines regarding marriage and the true meaning of human sexuality, founded on the Word of God and taught by the Church’s Magisterium for two millennia.

We commit ourselves anew to the task of presenting this teaching in all its fullness, while reaching out with the Lord’s compassion to those struggling to respond to the demands and challenges of the Gospel in an increasingly secular society. Furthermore we affirm the importance of upholding the Church’s traditional discipline regarding the reception of the sacraments, and that doctrine and practice remain firmly and inseparably in harmony.

We urge all those who will participate in the second Synod in October 2015 to make a clear and firm proclamation of the Church’s unchanging moral teaching, so that confusion may be removed, and faith confirmed.

Yours faithfully,

LifeSite News, the media face of the Campaign Life Coalition, published an interview with Cardinal Burke, the leader of the opposition to any change in pastoral practice regarding admitting those in irregular unions to the sacraments, in which His Eminence said the only pastoral help which the Church can give to those spouses who have been abandoned, to the children whose parents have divorced, to those who are “struggling with homosexual tendencies,” or to those who find themselves “trapped” in “illegitimate unions” is to hold the line of “traditional teaching” and to recognize “the sinfulness of the situation in which they find themselves” and to “leave that sinful situation and to find a way to live in accord with the truth.”  His Eminence went to say in the interview that the discussion of the possibility of welcoming those in irregular unions to the sacraments should not even have been discussed at the Synod.  For His Eminence, judgment rises or falls on the single issue of conforming to traditional sexual morality.  In regard to whatever kindnesses or generosity or charitable behavior that those in such unions might show, the Cardinal compared them to “the person who murders someone yet is kind to other people.”  The LifeSite News interview concludes with a request to sign a petition to Pope Francis to speak out and put an end to this discussion of changing pastoral practice regarding those remarried after civil divorce. 

Cardinal Burke’s remarks have been quoted—somewhat out of context—to say that he is equating the divorced and remarried and people in same-sex unions with murderers.  I don’t think His Eminence, who is one to express vociferously his opinions, but not always think them through first, consciously intended that judgment. But then with “The Lady in Red” who knows. 

Last year Cardinal Burke was one of five Cardinals who along with an archbishop and three theologians wrote a spirited attack on the proposal that the Church might change its discipline to admit the divorced and remarried to the sacraments.  The book, Remaining in the Truth of Christ, was a response to Cardinal Walter Kasper’s The Gospel of the Family as well as several addresses which the Cardinal gave—including one he gave last spring to his fellow Cardinals—in which the Cardinal outline how Church discipline might be changed to admit those whose marriages the Church does not recognize to receive Holy Communion.  Copies of Remaining in the Truth of Christ were delivered to the Synod Fathers during the October 2014 Phase I of the Synod to lobby against any proposed changes in sacramental discipline, but the books “mysteriously” disappeared before they found their ways into the Synod Father’s hands.  The blame for the books’ disappearance has been fixed on Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the General Secretary to the Synod.  American Life League President Judy Brown, a perennial sounder of the tocsin against Pope Francis and the directions in which he is taking the Church, has done much to pin the blame on Baldisseri without establishing the grounds for the charge.  And it must be remembered that Synod Rules prohibit any general distribution of materials to Synod members without those materials being first approved and then presented through the General Secretariat.   In other words, no one is allowed to just hand out materials on their own authority. 

All that being said, however, I must admit that I am not sure that I can see how the practice regarding admittance to the sacraments can be changed.  I am not a theologian, only a historian—but there is a long history to the Church’s restricting the sacraments to exclude those in irregular unions.  Individual cases have always been able to be adjudicated where due to specific circumstances and with the advice of a confessor or competent spiritual director individuals, either on a specific occasion or as a regular occurrence, are admitted to penance, Eucharist, or the anointing of the sick, but a sort of olly-olly-in-free is somewhat of an innovation.  However, should Pope Francis—Synod or no Synod—decide that it is time for such an innovation, I won’t resist, but then I am no cardinal.    

No Defeat for Francis

In Monday’s posting I mentioned that the Synod’s proposed statement that “men and women with homosexual tendencies must be welcomed with respect and delicacy” won a simple majority (118 in favor; 62 opposed) but fell just short of the required ⅔ to pass and be included in the relatio synodi.   We need to look at the other two proposals that also won a strong simple majority but failed to win the required ⅔ majority and so did not pass.  The first was paragraph 52.  It read:

The possibility for the divorced and remarried to accede to the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist was considered. Several Synod Fathers insisted in favor of the current discipline, in consideration of the constitutive relationship between participation in the Eucharist and communion with the Church and her teaching on indissoluble marriage. Others expressed themselves in favor of a non-generalized welcoming to the eucharistic table, in certain particular situations and in very specific circumstances, especially in cases that are irreversible and linked to moral obligations towards children who would [otherwise] be subjected to unjust suffering. The eventual access to the sacraments should be preceded by a penitential path under the responsibility of the diocesan Bishop. The matter should still be deepened, taking into consideration the distinction between an objective situation of sin and attenuating circumstances, considering that the "Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified" by several "psychological or social factors." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1735)]

This proposal suggested that the Church’s ban on the divorced and remarried receiving the sacraments, especially Reconciliation and the Eucharist, should be reexamined and pastoral alternatives devised not for general use but for specific situations determined by the Diocesan Bishop.  It explicitly does not change the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble.  It passed 104 to 74, but failed to reach the required  ⅔ majority

A parallel and somewhat more vague proposal suggesting that couples in a divorced and remarried situation avail themselves of “spiritual communion” and a response by some synod members that further study be given to the topic of the divorced and remarried being given access to both “spiritual communion” and sacramental communion also passed with a strong simple majority but not the required ⅔ majority.  The statement reads:

Some Fathers maintained that divorced and remarried persons can fruitfully accede to spiritual communion. Other Fathers asked why they cannot accede now to the sacramental one. A deepening of this question is hereby demanded so as to make clear the particularity of both forms and their connection with the theology of matrimony. 

The proposal carried 112 to 64.   

I don’t see quite how this is seen as a “defeat” for Pope Francis, Cardinal Kasper or others who favor a change of policy.  Granted, without the required ⅔ majority they are not part of the synod’s proposals for the follow up meeting in 2015, but the very fact that they have a strong support among the bishops makes it much more likely that the more progressive agenda will carry in next year’s synod.  At the very least, it is an indication that the bishops are buying into Francis’ view of Church and not anxious to succumb to the fear of change and put on the brakes for genuine reform and renewal of Catholic pastoral life.   I am not saying that it is a done deal.  The krazies—including several with miters and even the occasional scarlet galero—are doing the old Gideon trick of making enough noise to create the illusion of a phantom majority, but they are clearly out numbered.  The more serious threat is some action against Francis personally and I think he is playing a somewhat dangerous game.  The anger being expressed against Pope Francis by once loyal Catholics is frightening and we live in a society in which violence is endemic.  I think we will see increasing polarization over the next year until the 2015 Synod meets and if next year’s meeting follows in the direction of this year’s I will not be surprised if some sort of a schism follows.  We will monitor this ongoing and deepening division over the course of the year, but watch Pope Francis both for his appointments to the hierarchy and for his homilies and messages where I think he will even more aggressively argue for change.  

More on Sex and the Synod

Saint Augustine and his
mother, Saint Monica: the
tensions of Catholic Sexuality

The synod address by Ron and Mavis Pirola, the Australian couple who are co-directors of the Australian Marriage and Family Council that is advisory to the Australian Bishops’ Conference on issues of Pastoral life was a wonderful call for the Synod Fathers to examine their own attitudes on human sexuality.  Too many Catholics—and perhaps especially those who are leading celibate lives—consciously or unconsciously view sex as something sinful but which is given some moral legitimacy in marriage if accompanied by a willingness for procreation.  Our attitudes on sex and human sexuality are greatly shaped by Saint Augustine.  Now, I need to say that I am normally a great admirer of Augustine.  I think he is the greatest mind in the two thousand year history of the Church,  including the Apostles.  But even Augustine didn’t always get it right.  Augustine himself had flirted with Manichaeism for about ten years, from his mid-thirties to his mid-forties and Manichaeism tinged his attitude about human sexuality with its Gnosticism.  Augustine believed that every sexual act, even in marriage, was sinful and was only justified by the desire to reproduce.  While the Church does not explicitly teach this negative theology of human sexuality, this attitude has never been effectively expunged from the Catholic mind.  The requirement that a couple seeking to be married must “be open” to the possibility of having children for the marriage to be valid is one indication of this.  The prohibition of contraception is another.  In practice, of course, the Church understands that sex provides for married couples a depth of intimacy that is inseparable from the physical pleasure; it does not bar from marriage couples who for reasons of age or health are unable to conceive and, indeed, it requires the sexual union of the spouses—at least once after the vows have been made—for the validity of the marriage.  But lurking in the shadows of the Catholic consciousness is the conviction that something so pleasurable as sex must not be completely right.   It was therefore a milestone of change in Catholic thought when a married couple stood up in an assembly charged with shaping the magisterium and declared that the fullest expression of grace in their sacramental life was found in their sexual intimacy.  As one priest I know expresses the same idea: the spouses making love is to the sacrament of Matrimony what the priest celebrating Mass is to the Sacrament of Holy Orders.  Maybe we have finally slipped the bonds of Augustine’s own anguish over the guilt his mother, Monica, instilled in him about his relationship with the unnamed love of his life whom he abandoned at Monica’s directive.  (Augustine tells us in the Confessions that Monica had arranged a marriage for him with a woman of his own social class that required Augustine to abandon the fourteen year “common-law” relationship he had with an unnamed woman.  He expresses the deep love he had for this woman, his faithfulness to her throughout their relationship, and, of course, she was the mother of his son Adeodatus.)   The marriage Monica arranged never took place as Augustine instead embraced a quasi-monastic life after his baptism.  One would think that as a good Catholic, Monica would have been more concerned to have her son regularize the union that had produced his son rather than arrange a new marriage that would advance his career, but Monica is not quite the spiritual figure to which popular Catholic hagiography has reduced her.  Read the Confessions: it is enlightening about the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace, in Monica’s life as well as her son’s.) 

Ah yes, the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace.  That leads us to the point of conflict for many in the Synod and for even more of those following it from our armchairs and monitors.

Now for what I am going to write, I am not a theologian and am not giving a theological evaluation, only an explanation of the phenomenon to the best of my ability.   “Gradualism” or “the Law of Graduality” is a proposed principle in moral theology that recognizes that the Moral Law (as revealed in Scripture and Tradition) sets a standard for which we must all strive but to which we do not all achieve immediately.  It is sometimes simplified to “you can only do the best you can do” but such caricatures reduce it to moral ambivalence.  An example of gradualism, one presented by Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, would be of a woman who marries a man who was abandoned by his first wife and left with three children.  Granted, the woman should not have married the previously-married man in the first place until he received a Church annulment.  But now that she is married to him, the Cardinal said, she cannot abandon him and the care of the children.  Of course, it can be argued, that yes she can stay with him, but live in a brother/sister relationship until his first marriage is resolved canonically.  Maybe she can; maybe she can’t.  She loves the man, he loves her, and they find great blessings in their marriage—including in the sexual expression of their love.  Maybe they can’t find the strength to live without this intimacy.  Maybe they try to live in a non-sexual relationship and from time to time they fail. “The grace is always sufficient for us to do the right thing,” one person once told me when I presented a similar situation.  Yes, it is.  But maybe the right thing isn’t what we outsiders to the situation always think that it is. We need to listen attentively to the stories of sin and grace before we unilaterally—like the scribes and the Pharisees—make up our heavy burdens and lay them on others’ shoulders. 

The law of gradualism acknowledges that we develop morally.  We are not all the way yet at perfection.  We take two steps forward and fall one step back. 

This isn’t the same as moral relativism in which there are no moral absolutes—it is the acknowledgement that we all grow in our relationship with God and we all have room yet to grow in our relationship with God and none of us will be all the way there by the time we are summoned to the judgment seat.  If we were we would not need a Redeemer. 

If you check my entry for July 19, 2014 you will see that I wrote then about the theory of moral development which Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard professor of psychology, developed a half-century ago.  There has been criticism of Kohlberg’s schema over the intervening decades, but I think it still has great validity.  We move in our moral development from a fear of punishment through a fixation on law to a genuine appreciation of the moral good.  (I am skipping several steps here—check out Kohlberg for a more nuanced appreciation of his ideas.)  I think this corresponds to the principle of gradualism.  As I mature both psychologically and, from a Christian perspective, in my relationship with God I come to an ever-deepening appreciation for what is right and what is wrong.  As I move along the spectrum, I can not only move beyond a fear of punishment or the hope for some eternal reward, but I can transcend the bonds of the law and see the moral good for itself.  I can also see evil, not simply as it is defined by the law, but as it takes on its evil character from the situation in which it finds itself.  An example of this—to resort to the trivial for ease of understanding—I like my glass of whiskey at the end of the day.  There is nothing wrong with a glass of whiskey.  However as the first leads to the second and the second to the third and so on, the moral good (the relaxing glass of whiskey) takes on an evil character.  Another example, somewhat more complex.  I make love to my wife.  That is a good thing.  It is, as the Pirolas point out, a celebration of the Sacrament of Matrimony.  On this particular evening, my wife is not sexually responsive and I force her, not physically but still force her, to have sex with me.  A moral good has become evil in a way that the moral law does not foresee.  The moral law says that the wife has an obligation to satisfy the husband—and vice versa.  But the Law of Love, which is the true moral good, knows that this must be done freely and without coercion.  Those who focus solely on the Moral Law most often can’t get a clear vision of the Law of Love (aka the Gospel), which, again, was the flaw of the scribes, and the Pharisees.  There are those who are frozen in their own moral development and confident in their own righteousness without compassion for the complexity of others’ lives.  This moral fixedness is neither spiritually or psychologically healthy and can’t be allowed to be the moral guideposts—they are the blind guides leading the blind (Matt 15:14).    

The Fat is in the Fire: Those Wily Jesuits

Pope Francis at the Opening Mass

of the Synod

Well the Synod of Bishops opened today and the fight is on.  I was reading the responses to Father Anthony Ruff OSB’s posting on the blog Pray Tell (http://www.

praytellblog.com/index.php
/2014/10/03/where-does-pope-francis-want-the-synod-to-go/) and was surprised even there to find vociferous arguing about where the Church should go in its pastoral outreach to the divorced and remarried.  Usually the Pray Tell folk are, like most blog groupies, pretty homogenous and, given the direction of the blog site, on the liberal side of things. However, this issue of whether the Church should officially change its disciple regarding the sacramental life of those who are in second marriages stirs up very strong responses across the board and fights are breaking out everywhere from Rome to Rangoon.  And here is why I think Pope Francis is pretty, well how else can I say it, Jesuitical. 

Despite Cardinal Burke’s desperate yelps to the contrary, it is clear that Cardinal Kasper is the front man for Pope Francis and his ideas.  Francis can’t speak for himself and Cardinal Burke is not only disingenuous in saying that he can but downright duplicitous.  In fact, you would think that Burke was the Jesuit here in his manipulation of the truth.  Yes, Francis has active vocal cords and can speak.  I am sure he speaks a lot through the course of the day.  But he can’t speak on this issue without short-circuiting the processes of the synod.  The moment Francis says that he wants the discipline of the Church to change, the Synod is over.  All this is left for the prelates attending is to say “Yes, Holy Father,” and go home. 

Francis wants the bishops to do the deed and recommend a change in discipline.  For Francis, and rightly so, the days of the monarchial Church of Pius XII is over.  He is trying to reintroduce the collegiality so badly twisted under the last two pontificates.  But that is not to say that he hasn’t decided on the outcome that he wants.  He knows where he wants the Church to go.  He has entrusted Cardinal Kasper to be his point man and Kasper has done the job well.  But here is where Francis’ strategy kicks in.  The 2014 Synod, an “extraordinary” synod,  is only preparatory to the 2015 “ordinary” Synod where the final decisions will be made.  (Or, I should say, somewhat final because the Church is always in process and its pastoral practice, like its doctrinal life, continues constantly to evolve.)  In two weeks the various delegates (mostly bishops, archbishops, and cardinals) will return home after arguing both sides of the matter.  Once back home in their various dioceses the delegates will meet and report on the Synod with the various national conferences of bishops to whom they belong.  There will be discussions and arguments there as well as the delegates prepare to return next October for the ordinary and definitive synod.   Antonio Socci, an Italian journalist who is part of the Communione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation) Movement in the Catholic Church says that “Never before in the History of the Church had it happened that a majority of the cardinals had had to take public positions against an inversion of the Magisterium and of the discipline of the Church, that had been proposed by Cardinal Kasper, but that in reality had come from Bergoglio himself.” I am glad the Socci, unlike Cardinal Burke, is truthful enough to admit that Kasper’s proposals are really Francis’; but “A majority of the Cardinals?”—I don’t know if Socci is just outright lying or if the narrow and right-wing movement to which he belongs has limited his exposure to a certain segment of the clergy whose refined tastes and upper-class life-style has removed them from the daily realities of today’s faithful.  I would be very surprised if a clear, though not necessarily overwhelming, majority of the clergy, including the hierarchy, is not desperately praying for more effective pastoral solutions to minister to the divorced and remarried.  I suspect that behind the closed doors of various episcopal conferences there is going to be long and hard wrangling, not as to whether the discipline should be changed, but as to how can it be changed?  Cardinal Kasper, for his part (or for Pope Francis’ part) is not suggesting an “olly olly in free” for those in non-canonical second marriages, but a process by which those in such marriages can, after a period of reflection and penance, be reconciled to the Church and fully re-integrated into the Church’s sacramental life.  There will be prelates—like Cardinal Burke—who will be opposed, at least initially, to any change in Church discipline.  Most of these prelates, like Cardinal Burke, will be men who have spent their careers in church administration and not in pastoral work.  But those members of the hierarchy who at some point on their journey to the episcopate have walked the walk with the People of God and have, as a result of that walk, “a shepherd’s heart,” will comprehend the imperative of finding effective ways to let the Love of God shine into the hearts of those who feel lost or alienated from the Church not only because of a non-canonical marriage but for any one of dozens of reasons that so many today find themselves in some ecclesial pain. 

Francis’ strategy of two synods, synods a year apart, to devise a strategy of reintegrating the divorced and remarried into the sacramental life of the Church will not only permit the synod delegates to go back to their episcopal conferences and garner support for change, but will give Francis’ “Team Kasper” time to develop effective theological arguments to counter the “Team Burke” claims that no change in the discipline can be made.  This year’s synod is for the discussion and debate; next year’s is for concrete proposals as to how the discipline can be changed.  It means that the currently raging battles in the Catholic Press and the Catholic blogosphere will continue to storm on, and there are no guarantees that Francis’ strategy will be successful but it should be an interesting and energizing year.  And in any Church fracas my money is always on the Jesuit. They are a wily bunch, those Jesuits.