A Catholic magazine ran an article on divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. The writer was a professor of sociology—not a good sign when the issue is one of doctrine rather than social trends. After two pages of statistics and comparisons he got to his unsurprising prescription: let divorced Catholics remarry in the Church and let them receive Communion.
One did not have to wait until the end to discover the writer’s opinion. The article went bad in the first paragraph. He referred to the Church’s “discipline” that forbids remarriage after divorce, with “discipline” being used in the sense of “arbitrary rule.” Arbitrary rules can be abrogated—easy come, easy go.
The writer opined that “not all men in the hierarchy share the harsh views expressed in the Vatican’s reaffirmation of the current discipline.” Note the word “harsh.” Its opposite in this context is “pastoral.” The hierarchy is “harsh” if it expects Catholics to follow the moral law. It is “pastoral” if it looks the other way when they do not.
Of course, such thinking is applied selectively. It is not “harsh” to condemn those who are prejudiced against people of other races. It is not “pastoral” to ignore their prejudices and pretend that nothing is amiss.
Note, too, the phrase “current discipline.” It suggests that the discipline once was different and may—in all likelihood will—change back again. But the “current discipline” is the only discipline the Church has known on remarriage and divorce.
The Church, refusing to compromise on this very issue, acquiesced in a whole nation, England, leaving the fold. Henry VIII wanted a divorce followed by remarriage. The pope gave him neither, so Henry set up his own religion. He developed a new “discipline” on the issue. (Later, the English poet John Milton would write the first sustained defense of divorce.)
The magazine writer sighed that “at least for now, however, the refusal mentality has prevailed.” Again, loaded words. He could have written, “at least for now, however, the Church’s two-millennia-long teaching has prevailed,” but that would have undercut his point.
How to get around the official teaching of the Church? The writer recommends that “priests and ministers who are dealing with couples in the process of remarrying need to have a much broader mandate to act as pastors and not disciplinarians.”
Another fundamental confusion. There is no contradiction between acting as a pastor and acting as a disciplinarian. Sometimes enforcing discipline is the most pastoral thing one can do. Parents do not cease to be pastoral when they discipline errant children, and priests do not cease to be pastoral when they stand up for disciplines that are rooted firmly in the constant moral teaching of the Church.
The problem of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics is exacerbated by priests who take their cues from people like the sociologist. By not teaching clearly, directly, and repeatedly the indissolubility of marriage and the impossibility of remarriage after divorce (abstracting from those cases where an annulment may be obtained legitimately), many priests have made the situation worse.
Through their silence or, in some cases, through their public rejection of Church teaching, they have allowed false expectations to fester. Is it any wonder, as the writer notes, that “the remarried are becoming more numerous within the Church”?
In 2000 the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts issued a declaration on the reception of Communion by the divorced and civilly remarried. The declaration said that “the prohibition [against receiving Communion] found in [canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law] is derived from divine law and transcends the domain of positive ecclesiastical law: The latter cannot introduce legislative changes which would oppose the doctrine of the Church.”
In short, the prohibition on remarriage after divorce is not merely disciplinary. It is doctrinal too, and it has sacramental consequences.
Canon 915 is blunt. It says that “those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared, and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” This includes those who remarry civilly after divorce, since they are in “manifest grave sin.”
Some moral theologians, trying to get around canon 915, assert that the divorced and remarried are not in the state of grave sin, but that is muddled thinking. Such couples, if not living continently, are engaged in adultery, and adultery is always a mortal sin—and thus always “grave.”
Other theologians focus on the term “obstinately,” which, they say, means that the parties must show defiance of some sort. Not so. Obstinacy is shown by willing persistence in sin. The declaration says that obstinate persistence is “the existence of an objective situation of sin that endures in time and which the will of the individual member of the faithful does not bring to an end.”
In 1 Corinthians 11:27 Paul taught that those who receive Communion unworthily—that is, in the state of mortal sin—commit the sin of sacrilege. This was a “hard saying” for some Catholics two millennia ago. It is a hard saying for others today, including some sociologists.