America 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, 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. King 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.
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.
Priests who take their cues from people like the sociologist exacerbate the problem of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. By not teaching the indissolubility of marriage and the impossibility of remarriage after divorce (abstracting from those cases where an annulment may be obtained legitimately), they have made the situation worse. Is it any wonder, as the writer notes, that “the remarried are becoming more numerous within the Church”?
Last July 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] . . . 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 and thus cannot be changed, and it has sacramental consequences.