Since my comments on the issue of the moment in Roman Catholicism, communion for the divorce and remarried, have been overwhelmingly critical of the main proposals for a change in the church’s discipline, I think it’s only fair to write a post that addresses itself to what I think the church can do, without lurching into self-contradiction or betraying the New Testament, that might lift unnecessary burdens off some couples’ backs. I’ll use as my jumping-off point this post from Kyle Cupp at Patheos, which sketches a situation in which, as he puts it, “following doctrine can have harmful side effects”:
Imagine a couple. We’ll call them Fred and Wilma. Neither one of them has practiced their faith in their adult lives, but they’d now like to return to the Church. Wilma was somewhat raised in the Catholic faith. Fred was baptized in a non-denominational Christian church, but now he wants to become Catholic. They are married civilly and have a four-year-old son. When they go to their local Catholic parish, they learn from the priest that they need to be married in the Church before Fred can make his conversion. They’re accepting, but surprised. Neither of them knew the Catholic Church considered their marriage invalid.
Unfortunately, Fred has a previous courthouse marriage and needs to obtain an annulment before the Catholic Church will consider him free to marry Wilma. Eager to do what’s needed, Fred petitions the diocese to investigate his previous civil marriage. Two years later the annulment is denied. The parish priest tells the couple that their civil marriage cannot be convalidated and that they cannot continue to live as husband and wife if Fred wants to become Catholic and Wilma wants to receive the sacraments. Typically, the priest would tell the two of them that they have an obligation to separate; however, because they have a child, he tells them that “living as brother and sister” is an option for them.
Believing strongly that God is calling them to make this sacrifice, they agree to live no longer as a married couple. They cease all romantic affection. They move into separate rooms. They love each other, but they don’t show it in the ways they used to …
Things go downhill from there: The couple fights, grows apart, eventually splits up; Wilma marries someone else in the Catholic Church (since she’s free do to do so); Fred abandons religion altogether. Their son grows up miserable and confused, with “severe emotional distress, anxiety, and trust issues” that he “never fully escapes.” There is no happy ending.
The case is presumably invented, but the reality is not. As Cupp says, there will be cases, inevitably, where “preaching discipleship and holding people to doctrine can have negative side effects,” and where attempts to live by the church’s rules fail disastrously. This is not a problem that Catholicism can ever perfectly solve, at least not without just jettisoning doctrine and moral teaching entirely, and in any case that kind of jettisoning would create a different (I think much larger) set of miseries, both for people sinned against and for sinners left unrebuked and unrestrained. But at the same time, the necessity of doctrine doesn’t mean that every hard case needs to be made impossibly hard, or that people need to pushed into a potentially disastrous self-mortification when more merciful options are available.
In the kind of example that Cupp cites, though, I think there are other options — existing and potential — besides simply allowing Fred to be married again and receive communion notwithstanding his first marriage, as Cardinal Walter Kasper and his allies would have the church do. The first is the one that for the sake of the story Cupp rules out: An annulment of Fred’s civil marriage, which given the facts as conveyed would seem, at least in the American context, to be a more likely outcome than a denial of his petition. Every annulment case is different, perhaps there other factors that might make one less likely in this instance, maybe Cupp is drawing on real cases he’s known. But I speak from my own personal (no, not that personal, but close enough) experience when I say that annulments can be granted in cases where there would seem to be far fewer reasons to presumptively doubt the validity of the first marriage than the not-particularly-religious Fred’s non-Catholic civil wedding. Again, this doesn’t mean that the scenario Cupp describes couldn’t happen, and the American model for annulment tribunals is not the global church’s model, so it could certainly happen elsewhere. But the evidence I’ve seen and what I’ve personally witnessed suggests that the annulment system in the U.S. is already likely to err, in cases like Fred’s, on the side of the petitioner’s case.
Then it’s also worth noting that depending on the details of the first marriage there are also another option, or options, in play: The so-called “Pauline” and “Petrine” privileges, which exist for would-be converts whose first spouse does not wish to follow them into the church. (I believe they would only apply, however, if Fred’s first wife were herself not a baptized Christian.)
So those are existing possibilities. But the church could, I think, go even further in specific cases like Fred’s without risking self-contradictions and slippery slopes. For instance, it could decide that given the state of marriage law in many countries (the normalization of divorce, the inclusion of same-sex relationships), marriages contracted purely civilly in the western world no longer fit the pattern required for a valid natural marriage, because the legal and social structure in which those civil vows take place no longer implies either a true commitment to permanence or a necessary openness to children. In effect, the church would begin to treat civil marriage the way I presume it treats a French pacte civil de solidarité — as a legal union that no longer has the form required to qualify as a marriage in the church’s eyes, and thus need not pose an impediment if, after its dissolution, one of the parties sought a Catholic marriage later on.
Given the church’s longstanding recognition of non-Catholic and non-Christian marriages, this would be a very significant step with uncertain further implications (for instance: what about marriages contracted in churches that have made their peace with the sexual revolution?), and I’m not at all sure it would be the right one. But it would be compatible with church teaching on a valid marriage’s fundamental indissolubility in a way that Kasper’s proposals very much are not, and in practical terms it would both extend a kind of mercy to some couples who wish to be married in the church and also highlight, rather than efface, the distinctiveness of the Catholic view of marriage. And it would also, as a side effect, clear away what can seem like one of the strangest features of the current system, whereby Catholics who marry in civil ceremonies and later divorce do not need annulments to remarry, because the church considers their first marriages invalid (since Catholics are required to have their marriages blessed by the church), while non-Catholics who do exactly the same thing and later want to become Catholic are required to go through the annulment process … with the practical effect that lapsed Catholics can seem like they get a kind of trial-marriage opportunity unavailable to people who weren’t baptized in the church.
What it would not clear away, of course, are the challenges faced by divorced-and-remarried Catholics who did marry initially the church, which is a far larger population than the Freds of the world. And while an annulment system can err on the side of petitioners (and does, it would seem, for American Catholics in that position), there is only so far it can err before it really does just become a kind of Catholic divorce, a sophist’s rubber-stamp for serial polygamy. For the church’s teaching to be consistent, coherent, faithful, and just to all the parties involved in a marriage — children and spouses alike — there cannot be a system where nobody suffers for any of their choices, where nobody’s desires are traduced, where nobody is asked to bear a cross.
But my point here is that there is some space within existing church teaching for changes — be they a fairer, faster annulment system in Europe, Africa, and Latin America or canonical reforms aimed at particularly difficult cases like the one Cupp describes — that would not carry Catholicism into a position where its teaching becomes a non-teaching, a rule devoured by the exceptions, an alleged sign of contradiction that signifies nothing save lip service to the law. And part of my obvious suspicion of Cardinal Kasper and his supporters is that I don’t quite understand why, if they really do wish to preserve the New Testament principle of indissolubility, they would not first press their case for mercy in these areas, rather than leaping so swiftly to a change that would strike so directly at the foundation of Catholic marriage, and carry so many other changes in its wake.