The Pope’s Marriage Endgame... Ross Douthat

[mystery-ak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-popes-marriage-endgame.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

IT’S been 18 months since Pope Francis invited Cardinal Walter Kasper to raise anew the argument that divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive communion. That invitation touched off a civil war within the church’s hierarchy, pitting cardinal against cardinal, theologian against theologian; the conflict has reverberated across books, speeches, and op-ed pages, and it’s dominated the church’s synod on the family, whose second meeting looms this fall.

It’s clear that this was all intentional: That Francis wanted a big internal argument over marriage and communion, that he deliberately started this civil war.

The question that remains unanswered, though, is how the pope intends to finish it.

Ever since last fall, Vatican tea-leaf readers have been busy, looking for signs that Kasper might be falling out of favor, or alternatively, for evidence that Francis might be stacking the synod’s deck in favor of communion for the remarried.

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[sinkspur]

Many bishops, in fact most, will take advantage of this streamlined process, especially since Francis has basically told them to not impose any fees for annulments.  He didn't go as far as I wanted, but he went pretty far, and effectively endorsed the American norms for annulments.  He's just shortening the time, which was a major stumbling block for lots of remarried Catholics and those wanting to become Catholic.

The truth of the matter is that many priests already take care of the Communion question in the internal forum of confession. In other words, Catholics who feel they have a case but don't want to go through the long annulment process go to confession and the priest tells them to just go ahead and receive the Eucharist.  Like it or not, this happens, a lot.

And many Catholics who have remarried without an annulment just decide on their own to go, especially if they've been told they have no grounds for an annulment. 

On the other hand, many many Catholics have left the Church over this issue and will never return, since they've made peace with God outside the strictures of Catholicism.