Vatican: Phone Call Didn't Change Church Teaching

As archbishop of Bueonos Aires, Msgr. Bergoglio regularly permitted divorced and remarried congregants to receive communion in the poor parishes of the city where he said mass, according to evidence in Paul Vallely's biography of the pope, "Untying the Knots," though a rationale apparently wasn't addressed openly. A close priest associate is quoted to the effect that restricting communion would have been contrary to the welcome accorded poor people.

This is not surprising but a cause for much hope for the divorced and remarried Catholics worldwide. What Pope Francis has done, if we believe what has been reported, is not dissimilar to the pastoral practices of many priests. The book is not closed forever on such teachings but open to development, in particular in the pastoral application of the moral norm. Below is an part of a recent speech given by Cardinal Walter Kasper, prefect emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. You can read the entire article at: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/cardinal-kaspers-speech-on-divorce-remarriage-and-communion/. Noting that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1994 wrote that those who are divorced and remarried can make an act of spiritual communion, he asked, “Why, then, can [such a person] not also receive sacramental Communion?” He claimed that, in the early Church, when someone entered a new relationship even though their spouse was still alive, “after a period of penance, had available … a life raft through admission to Communion.” Suggesting a “way of conversion” involving the sacrament of confession, he asked, “Is it also the path that we could follow in the present question?” When someone who is divorced and remarried “repents of his failure in the first marriage”; if he cannot return to the first marriage; if he “cannot abandon without further harm” the responsibilities of his second marriage; if “he is doing the best he can to live out the possibilities of the second marriage on the basis of the faith and to raise his children in the faith”; and if “he has a desire for the sacraments as a source of strength in his situation,” Cardinal Kasper said, then “should we or can we deny him, after a period of time of a new orientation (metanoia), the sacrament of penance and then of Communion?” He clarified that this is not “a general solution,” but is “the narrow path of what is probably the smaller segment of the divorced and remarried, those sincerely interested in the sacraments.” “Life is not just black or white; there are, in fact, many nuances.” Cardinal Kasper emphasized the need for “discretion, spiritual discernment, sagacity and pastoral wisdom” in these cases. “This discretion is not an easy compromise between the extremes of rigorism and laxity, but, as is every virtue, a perfection between these extremes.” Let us pray that the Synod on the Family will follow both Pope Francis and Cardinal Kasper's reflections.