Those who watched the livestream of the September 8, 2015 symposium with Cardinal Burke and a panel of experts heard an abstract read
aloud by each of the panel members. Cardinal Burke's address, as well as the full-length papers of the panelists, will be published in a book
from Emmaus Road entitled From the Beginning:The Mission and Vocation of the Family in the Contemporary World. Those who pre-order between now and
September 14 will receive a 35% pre-publication discount (click here):
$12.95 instead of the list price of $19.95.
Meanwhile, for those who did not watch the livestream
or who would prefer to have the abstracts in writing, here they are, in the
order in which they were given at the event. Some of the abstracts were read in
modified form.
The Synod on the Family:
Addressing the Instrumentum Laboris
Keynote:
His Eminence
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke
Followed by a Panel Discussion
September 8,
2015
Franciscan
University of Steubenville
ABSTRACTS
The Indissolubility of Marriage and the Problem of Relativism
Pope
Francis has taken the extraordinary step of convoking two synods of bishops in
a brief period of time to discuss issues pertaining to marriage and the family
in the Church and in the world. His concerns about these issues are well founded
as evidenced by the numerous challenges to and attacks on marriage and family
that many people throughout the world, including faithful Catholics, have encountered
particularly since the close of Vatican Council II. This paper addresses the need
for the synod of bishops on “The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the
Church and the Contemporary World” to affirm clearly the traditional meaning of
marriage first and foremost due to the Divine nature of that teaching. Moreover,
the suggested pastoral solution that proposes a “narrow gate” for participation
in the sacramental life for those in irregular unions has been considered and
rejected on numerous occasions in the past at various levels of the Holy See.
Additionally, any purported change to the Church’s teachings and laws on these
matters would raise numerous issues, including the risk of relativizing these heretofore-absolute
truths about Christian marriage as an indissoluble and exclusively faithful
union between a man and a woman, which Christ raised to a sacrament between the
baptized.
Marriage as a Natural
Community Requires a Lifelong Commitment
Patrick Lee, PhD
As a natural community marriage is the union of a man
and a woman who have committed to sharing their lives on all levels of their
humanity—bodily as well as emotionally and spiritually, of the kind that would
be naturally fulfilled by conceiving and rearing children together (even though
in some instances that fulfillment is not reached). The nature of marriage
requires that it be founded on a lifelong commitment and constitute an unbreakable
bond. The moral bond of marriage—the set of rights and obligations to each
other created by the mutual consent of the spouses—is distinct from the fullness
of that community. The marital union may be more or less full, without
weakening the marital bond. No one can promise what he or she has no control
over. But the marriage commitment is to voluntary conduct. Thus marriages
cannot die of themselves. The marital bond remains even though the feeling of
love or the depth of the union to which the spouses have committed may erode.
Oikonomia in the Church Today?:
Divorce and Remarriage in the Early Church and Developments from Vatican II to
the Present
Pia Crosby and Stephen Hildebrand,
PhD
Both the Gospels and the Letters of Paul witness to the
Lord’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, wherein adultery can be a
cause for separation but does not indicate the permissibility of remarriage. The
Fathers, nearly unanimously, understood this teaching of the Lord, despite erroneous
claims that Christians could not have contradicted Roman law (they did) or that
the Fathers understood the rupture of a marriage to entail the possibility of
remarriage (they didn’t).
Ambrosiaster alone in the
patristic tradition stands for genuine divorce and remarriage. Justin Martyr,
Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Basil—who is most often erroneously
placed in the company of Ambrosiaster—Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome, and Augustine
(the list could go on) all witness to the permanence of marriage and the acceptance
of separation in certain circumstances, but not with a view toward re-marriage.
Special consideration must be given to Basil in order to show (1) that he does
not endorse divorce and remarriage and (2) that he does allow an oikonomia that
anticipates Kasper’s. (In this usage the term oikonomia means “an accommodation.”)
Basil tolerates a divorced man co-habiting with a woman who is not his wife but
stops short of Kasper’s indication that such a man can be admitted to
communion.
From Melkite Archbishop’s
Zoghby’s plea at the Second Vatican Council that the Church follow the Eastern
Orthodox practice of oikonomia, there has been a vibrant debate of it
among leading Western theologians and prelates. In the early 1970s, Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger had come to much the same
conclusion as Kasper now has. Under the influence of John Paul II, he changed his
position while serving as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith. John Paul and Ratzinger/Benedict XVI repeatedly re-affirmed the teaching
on the indissolubility of marriage and the inability of the divorced and
remarried to receive communion. In July of 2013, Pope Francis himself re-opened
what seemed to be a closed discussion in response to a journalist’s questions
about communion for the divorced and remarried out of a desire to offer truly
merciful pastoral care to those in very painful circumstances.
The proposal for oikonomia raises
questions about how the contemporary Church can rightly make use of the customs
and traditions of the ancient Church. To adopt and expand this practice would constitute
distortion rather than development in the Church’s understanding of marriage
and the universal call to holiness, for it denies the truth about marriage and deprives
the faithful in difficult circumstances of the call to heroic virtue in imitation
of Christ.
The Evil of Divorce and the
Dignity of the Human Person: Understanding the Immorality of Divorce through St.
John Paul II’s Theology of the Body
Donald Asci, STD
In Familiaris Consortio
Pope St. John Paul II describes bearing “witness to the inestimable value of the
indissolubility and fidelity of marriage” as “one of the most precious and
urgent tasks” of Christians, especially married couples, in our time. While it
primarily “reconfirms the good news of the definite nature of conjugal love
that has Christ as ‘its foundation and strength,” Catholic teaching on the indissolubility
of marriage also includes the explicit recognition of the immorality of divorce
itself even apart from the compounding evil of civil remarriage after a
divorce. However, as recent discussions of the indissolubility of marriage surrounding
the Synod have suggested, few seem to find exploring the evil of divorce itself
to be an important topic, much less an urgent task, with the focus being
shifted instead to the cases of those who compound the evil of divorce with a
civil remarriage and their situation regarding Eucharistic communion. This essay
addresses divorce as a grave offense against the dignity of the human person by
approaching the question through the spousal meaning of the body articulated in
St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. Viewing divorce from the perspective of
the spousal meaning of the body makes the evil of divorce more dearly an affront
to the intrinsic value of the human person and a type of consumerism in the marital
sphere, which in turn likens divorce to the evil of euthanasia. This essay secondarily
examines how divorce can in some cases be a form of despair, especially despair
in the face of suffering or despair over the possibility of reconciliation, which
sets divorce against the sacramental character of marriage. Finally, this essay
proposes that by failing to address the evils of divorce clearly and adamantly,
Catholics may be undercutting our attempts to defend the dignity of the human person
in other situations (e.g. euthanasia, abortion, and the sex industry) and our
attempts to foster Christian hope in general and in the sexual sphere
specifically.
Communion for the Divorced and
Remarried
Michael Sirilla, PhD
In his proposal, which appears in the current Instrumentum Laboris for the 2015 Ordinary
Synod, articles 120 and following, Cardinal Walter Kasper recommends a new pastoral
discipline for the Church in which bishops would decide on a case-by-case basis
whether to admit divorced and “remarried” Catholics to receive the Sacrament of
Holy Communion after repenting of their divorce but without requiring the
sacramental confession of adultery and a firm commitment to live in complete continence.
This suggested
change in pastoral discipline is presented as more
merciful than the Church’s current practice; but in fact it constitutes a grave
sin of scandal in the strict sense. This is established by looking at his
proposal in light of the following six points of immutable doctrine:
1. Sacramental marriage is a lifelong marital bond, dissolvable only
by death.
2. The act of abandonment of the active divorcer with
the intention to sever this bond is gravely sinful.
3. Those who attempt “remarriage” commit a further grave
sin that Christ calls adultery.
4. Reception of Holy Communion in a state of
unrepentant mortal sin is itself a grave sin of sacrilege.
5. Bishops who admit (or those who direct or encourage
bishops to admit) unrepentant persons to Holy Communion commit a grave sin of scandal.
6. Divorcees who repent, commit to live in complete continence,
and receive sacramental absolution are
not in a state of mortal sin (at least with respect to
the divorce and “remarriage”); but those who do not are in a state of mortal sin,
given their full knowledge and consent. If a pastor discerns invincible ignorance
on the part of the couple in this regard, it is his solemn duty to inform them
clearly of their situation and urge them to repent so that they may truly find
the mercy of Christ.
The Synod fathers and the Pope
must reject Cardinal Kasper’s ersatz proposal of mercy as found in the Instrumentum Laboris and instead unequivocally reaffirm
Christ’s genuine offer of mercy as found in the Church’s perennial practice and
expressed by Pope St. John Paul II in Familiaris
Consortio, a.
84.
How the Liturgical Reform Has
Contributed to the Crisis of the Synod
Peter Kwasniewski, PhD
Many
factors have contributed to the precipitous decline of Catholics’ knowledge of
and adherence to the Church’s Magisterium on marriage and the family. A
neglected factor, however, may turn out to be the sacred liturgy, which is
where Catholics most commonly encounter the Church and her teaching. It is
worth asking whether tremendous changes in the form of the liturgy itself,
taken together with prevailing customs of celebration, may have contributed to
confusion, uncertainty, ignorance, laxity, and heterodoxy in the realm of
marriage and family. My essay tests the hypothesis in five areas: the
suppression or marginalization of key Scripture texts in the reformed
lectionary; the advance of feminism and egalitarianism in liturgical
ministries; the doctrinal and spiritual deficiencies of contemporary church music
and other sacred arts; the disconnect between the Church’s exalted
doctrine and the horizontal, anthropocentric ars celebrandi of wedding ceremonies; and the almost total loss of
asceticism in connection with the reception of Holy Communion. If the
argumentation is cogent, it follows that the Church today must take much more
seriously the urgent need for a “reform of the reform” as well as the promotion
of the traditional form of the Roman Rite, which is unencumbered with the
foregoing difficulties.
Pharasaism and Marriage
John Bergsma, PhD
In current discussions of marriage within the Catholic
Church, it has at times been asserted or implied that those who support the
Church’s standing doctrine on marriage—the non-recognition of second unions, publically
indicated by abstention from Eucharistic communion by those in such unions—have
a “Pharisaical” attitude toward the divorced and remarried. This stated or implied
accusation needs to be submitted to critical scrutiny. The following points need
to be made:
l. The Pharisees had few or no objections to divorce and remarriage,
but Jesus did.
2. Jesus preached a more rigorous practice of Divine
and moral law than the Pharisees.
3. Jesus criticized the Pharisees not for rigorous
moral standards, but for using religious legalism and casuistry to avoid the
demands of the Divine and moral law.
4. Jesus criticized the Pharisees also for insisting
on exaggerated interpretations of ceremonial law, which were difficult for the
poor to follow.
5. In sum, Jesus was unyielding in his fidelity to
Divine and moral law, but generous in his interpretation of ceremonial law. The
indissolubility of marriage belongs to the former.
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