by Roberto de Mattei

Kasper cannot erase history and doctrine with 
“a resounding revolution of culture and praxis”

“The doctrine does not change; the only change concerns pastoral praxis [practice].” This slogan, now repeated for a year, on the one hand reassures those conservatives who measure everything in terms of doctrinal statements, and on the other hand encourages those progressives who attach little value to doctrine and who trust only in the primacy of praxis.

Subordination to worldly powers

A striking example of the cultural revolution proposed in the name of praxis is offered to us by the presentation devoted to “The Gospel of the Family” with which Cardinal Walter Kasper opened the work of the Extraordinary Consistory on the Family on February 20. The text, described by Father Federico Lombardi as “in great harmony” with the thought of Pope Francis, deserves also for this reason to be evaluated in its full extent.
The starting point of Cardinal Kasper is the observation that “between the Church’s doctrine on marriage and family and the convictions lived out by many Christians, a chasm has been created.” The Cardinal, however, avoids formulating a negative judgment on these “convictions” antithetical to the Christian faith, evading the fundamental question: why is there such a chasm between Church doctrine and the philosophy of life of contemporary Christians? What is the nature, what are the causes of the process of dissolution of the family? In no part of the presentation is it pointed out that the crisis of the family is the result of a planned attack on the family, the result of a secular worldview that is opposed to it. And this despite the recent document on Standards for Sex Education by the World Health Organization (WHO), the approval of the “Lunacek Report” by the European Parliament, and the legalization of same-sex marriages and the criminalization of homophobia by many Western governments. And the question still remains: Is it possible in 2014 to devote 25 pages to the subject of the family, ignoring the objective aggression that the family, on both a Christian and natural level, undergoes all over the world? What might be the reasons for this silence if not a psychological and cultural subordination to those worldly powers that promote the attack on the family?

Change doctrine without seeming to change it

In the key part of his presentation, devoted to the problem of divorced and remarried persons, Cardinal Kasper does not express a single word of condemnation about divorce and its disastrous effects on Western society. But is it not now time to say that much of the crisis of the family dates back to the introduction of divorce and that the facts show that the Church was right to fight it? Who should say it if not a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church? But the Cardinal seems to be interested only in the “paradigm shift” that the situation of divorced and remarried persons requires today.
As if to prevent the immediate objections, the Cardinal immediately puts his hands forward: the Church “cannot propose a solution different from or contrary to the words of Jesus.” The indissolubility of a sacramental marriage and the impossibility of a new marriage during the life of the other spouse “is part of the Church’s binding tradition of Faith that cannot be abandoned or undone in the name of a superficial and cheap understanding of mercy.” But immediately after proclaiming the need to remain faithful to Tradition, Cardinal Kasper advances two devastating proposals to circumvent the perennial Magisterium of the Church in matters of family and marriage. 
The method to be adopted, according to Kasper, is that followed by the Second Vatican Council on the issues of ecumenism and religious liberty: to change doctrine without seeming to change it. “The Council,” he says, “without violating the binding dogmatic tradition has opened the doors.” Opened the doors to what? To the systematic violation, on the level of praxis, of that dogmatic tradition to which allegiance is claimed only with words.
The first way to frustrate this Tradition is inspired by the apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio of John Paul II, where he says that some divorced and remarried persons “are subjectively certain in conscience that their previous and irreparably destroyed marriages had never been valid” (§84). Familiaris Consortio states, however, that the decision on the validity of the marriage cannot be left to the subjective assessment of the person, but to the ecclesiastical tribunals established by the Church to defend the sacrament of marriage. Referring to these very courts, the Cardinal strikes the blow: “Because they are not of divine law, but have developed historically, one wonders sometimes if the judicial process should be the only way to resolve the problem or if other more pastoral and spiritual procedures would not be possible. As an alternative, one might think that the bishop could entrust this task to a priest with spiritual and pastoral experience as a penitentiary or episcopal vicar.”
The proposal is destructive. The ecclesiastical tribunals are the organs to which the exercise of the judicial power of the Church is normally entrusted. The three main courts are the Apostolic Penitentiary, which judges cases of the internal forum, the Roman Rota, which receives on appeal the judgments from any other ecclesiastical court, and the Apostolic Signatura, which is the supreme judicial body, comparable to the Supreme Court in relation to lesser courts. Benedict XIV, with his famous constitution Dei Miseratione, introduced for marriage cases the principle of automatic appeal of every affirmative judicial decision. This practice protects the pursuit of truth, ensures a just outcome of the case, and shows the importance which the Church attaches to the sacrament of marriage and its indissolubility. The proposal by Kasper puts into question the objective judgment of the ecclesiastical tribunal, which would be replaced by a simple priest, who is called no longer to safeguard the good of marriage, but to satisfy the needs of an individual’s conscience.

Judicial dimension absorbed

Referring to the speech of January 24, 2014, to the officials of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota in which Pope Francis says that the judicial activity of the Church has a deeply pastoral connotation, Kasper absorbs the judicial dimension into the pastoral dimension, stating the need for a new “legal and pastoral hermeneutic” which sees, behind every case, the “human person.” “Is it really possible, one wonders, to make a decision for the good or ill of people in the second and third instance [tribunals of appeal] only on the basis of acts, that is to say papers, but without knowing the person and his situation?” These words are offensive to the ecclesiastical tribunals and to the Church herself, whose acts of governance and teaching are based on papers, declarations, juridical and doctrinal acts, all directed to the salus animarum. One can easily imagine how marriage annulments would explode, introducing Catholic divorce in fact if not in law, with devastating harm precisely to the good of human persons.
Cardinal Kasper seems to be aware of it, because he adds: “It would be wrong to try to solve the problem just with a generous expansion of the procedures for nullity of marriage.” We must “take into account the more difficult question of the situation of ratified and consummated marriage between baptized persons, where the communion of marital life is irretrievably broken and one or both spouses have entered into a second civil marriage.” Kasper cites at this point a statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1994 according to which the divorced and remarried cannot receive sacramental communion, but may receive spiritual communion. It is a statement in line with the Tradition of the Church. But the Cardinal makes a leap forward, asking this question: “He who makes a spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ, so how can he be in contradiction with the commandment of Christ? Why, then, can he not also receive sacramental communion? If we exclude divorced and remarried Christians from the sacraments...do we not put into question the fundamental sacramental structure of the Church?”

Sacramental structure of the Church

In reality there is no contradiction in the centuries-old practice of the Church. The divorced and remarried are not discharged from their religious duties. As baptized Christians, they are always expected to observe the commandments of God and the Church. They have therefore not only the right but the duty to go to Mass, to observe the precepts of the Church, and to educate their children in the Faith. They cannot receive sacramental communion because they are in mortal sin, but can make a spiritual communion because even those who find themselves in a position of grave sin must pray to obtain the grace to get out of sin. But the word sin is not within the vocabulary of Cardinal Kasper and never emerges in his presentation to the Consistory. Should we be surprised if, as Pope Francis himself said on January 31, today “the sense of sin has been lost”?
The early Church, according to Cardinal Kasper, “gives us an indication which may serve as a way out” of what he calls “the dilemma.” The Cardinal said that in the early centuries there was a practice whereby some Christians, after a time of penance, lived in a second marriage even though their first spouse was still living. “Origen,” he says, “speaks of this practice, describing it as ‘not unreasonable.’ Also Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen—two Fathers of the still-undivided Church!—refer to this practice. Augustine himself, otherwise quite strict on the issue, at least at one point seems not to have ruled out any pastoral solution. These Fathers wanted, for pastoral reasons, in order to ‘avoid the worst,’ to tolerate what is in itself impossible to accept.”
It is a shame that the Cardinal did not give his patristic references because historical reality is quite different from how he describes it. Father George H. Joyce, in his historical and doctrinal study on Christian marriage (1948) showed that during the first five centuries of the Christian era you cannot find any decree of a council, nor any declaration of a Father of the Church which supports the possibility of dissolution of the marriage bond. When in the second century Justin, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch refer to the evangelical prohibition of divorce, they give no indication of an exception. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian are even more explicit. And Origen, although looking for some justification for the practice adopted by some bishops, states that it contradicts Scripture and the Tradition of the Church (Comment. in Matt, XIV, c. 23, Patrologia Greca, Vol. 13, col. 1245). Two of the early church Councils, those of Elvira (306) and of Arles (314), reiterate this clearly. In all parts of the world the Church believed the dissolution of the bond was impossible, and divorce with the right to remarriage was completely unknown. The one among the Fathers who treated the question of indissolubility most widely was St. Augustine, in many of his works from De diversis Quaestionibus (390) to De Coniugiis adulterinis (419). He refutes those who complained about the severity of the Church in matrimonial matters and is always unshakably firm on the indissolubility of marriage, showing that once marriage is contracted, it cannot be broken for any reason or circumstance. It is to him that we owe the famous distinction between the three goods of marriage: proles, fides, and sacramentum.
Equally false is the notion of a dual position, Latin and Eastern, in regard to divorce in the first centuries of the Church. It was only after Justinian that the Church of the East began to yield to Caesaropapism, conforming to the Byzantine laws that tolerated divorce, while the Church of Rome affirmed the truth and the independence of her doctrine in relation to the civil powers. Regarding St. Basil, we invite Cardinal Kasper to read his letters and to find in them a passage that explicitly authorizes a second marriage. His thinking is summed up by what he writes in the Ethica: “It is not lawful for a man to put away his wife and marry another. Nor is it permissible for a man to marry a woman who has been divorced by her husband” (Ethica, Regula 73, c. 2, Patrologia Greca, Vol. 31, col. 852). The same is true of the other author cited by the Cardinal, St. Gregory Nazianzen, who clearly writes: “Divorce is absolutely contrary to our laws, although the laws of the Romans judge differently” (Epistola 144 in Patrologia Greca, Vol. 37, col. 248).

Paradoxical position

The “canonical penitential practice” that Cardinal Kasper proposes as a way out of the “dilemma” in the early centuries had a meaning exactly the opposite of what he wants to attribute to it. It was not done to atone for a first marriage, but to repair the sin of the second, and obviously demanded repentance for this sin. The Eleventh Council of Carthage (407), for example, issued a canon thus worded: “We decree that, according to the evangelical and apostolic discipline, the law does not permit a man divorced from his wife, nor a woman divorced from her husband, to move on to another wedding; but that such persons must remain alone, or be reconciled to each other, and that if they violate this law, they must do penance” (Hefele-Leclercq, Histoire des Conciles, Vol. II (I), p. 158).
The position of the Cardinal becomes paradoxical here. Instead of repenting of the sinful situation in which one finds himself, the remarried Christian should repent of his first marriage, or at least of its failure, for which perhaps he is totally innocent. Also, by admitting the legitimacy of post-matrimonial cohabitation, it supposes that premarital cohabitation should be allowed, if stable and sincere. It means the collapse of the “moral absolutes,” which John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor had so strongly emphasized. But Cardinal Kasper calmly proceeds in his reasoning. “If a divorced and remarried person: (1) repents of his failure in the first marriage; (2) has clarified the obligations of the first marriage, if a return is definitively excluded; (3) cannot without further fault leave behind the commitments assumed by his new civil marriage; (4) strives to live in the second marriage to the best of his ability from the standpoint of the faith and to educate his children in the faith; (5) and has a desire for the sacraments as a source of strength in his situation, should we or can we deny him, after a time of reorientation (metanoia), the sacrament of penance and communion?”
To these questions the answer has already been given by Cardinal Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (“La forza della gratia,” L’Osservatore Romano, October 23, 2013) invoking Familiaris Consortio, which in No. 84 provides precise indications of a pastoral nature consistent with the dogmatic teaching of the Church on marriage: “Together with the Synod, I earnestly call upon pastors and the whole community of the faithful to help the divorced with solicitous charity so that they do not consider themselves as separated from the Church, as they are able to and indeed required to share in her life as baptized persons. They should be encouraged to listen to the Word of God, to attend the Sacrifice of the Mass, to persevere in prayer, to contribute to works of charity and to community efforts for justice, to bring up their children in the Christian faith, to cultivate the spirit and practice of penance and thus implore, day by day, the grace of God. May the Church pray for them, encourage them, and show herself a merciful mother, and thus sustain them in faith and hope. The Church, however, reaffirms her practice, based on Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion those who are divorced and remarried. They are unable to be admitted from the moment that their state and their condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church signified and effected by the Eucharist.”
The Church’s position is unequivocal. Com­mun­ion for divorced and remarried persons is denied because marriage is indissoluble, and none of the reasons given by Cardinal Kasper allows the celebration of a new marriage or blessing of a pseudo-matrimonial union. The Church would not allow it to Henry VIII, thus losing the Kingdom of England, and will never allow it because, as pointed out by Pius XII to the parish priests of Rome on March 16, 1946: “Marriage validly contracted and consummated between the baptized cannot be dissolved by any power on earth, not even by the Supreme ecclesiastical Authority.” In other words, not even by the Pope, and certainly not by Cardinal Kasper.