A Layman Responds to Cardinal Kasper’s Proposal, Part II

Cardinal Walter Kasper, retired president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, in January 2014. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

A Layman Responds to Cardinal Kasper’s Proposal, Part II | Dr. José Durand Mendioroz | CWR

An Argentine lawyer and professor of law responds in detail to the arguments and suggestions of Cardinal Walter Kasper.

[Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a series examining Cardinal Walter Kasper’s proposals regarding the reception of Communion by the civilly divorced and remarried. The first can be read here.]

The conditions to receive sacramental Communion

We will analyze here the “conditions” under which Cardinal Kasper would allow sacramental Communion for divorced persons in second civil unions, with the end in mind of evaluating if these conditions are in the first place sufficiently defined. Later we will analyze the reception Cardinal Kasper’s proposals met with at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family last October, as reflected in the post-synodal Final Report.

“If a divorced and remarried…”

We should be precise in the terms employed in order to avoid misconstruing their real significations by “slippage in meaning.”

The first condition cited here is remarkably imprecise, inasmuch as it refers to two realities in the civil sphere, while what interests us here is the religious sphere, in which neither divorce nor remarriage once divorced is possible. The formulation needs to utilize appropriate, fitting terms; if a “divorcee” had never contracted a sacramental marriage, it would be of no interest to us in the matter being analyzed.

Moreover, one should not facilitate an equivocation—even an unconscious one—between sacramental and civil marriage, due to their distinct natures and effects and to the institutional precariousness of civil marriage. In order to attain a greater clarity, we shall speak of sacramental marriage and of civil marriage (or civil union).

We should then reformulate this condition; if we lose some concision, we avoid something worse—that is, confusion: “If someone who is bound by a sacramental marriage should civilly marry a person other than the sacramental spouse…”

“…is truly sorry that he or she has failed in the first marriage”

We should state precisely that in this case there is no “first” marriage, but only “a single sacramental marriage.” The second has no merely ordinal difference from the first, but does have an essential difference: the religious marriage subsists in the life of the spouses, while in the civil sphere the sequence is marriage, divorce, and remarriage.

The cited condition is broader than is indicated by Kasper in his initial exposition (the “deserted” spouse without guilt). Because if only an innocent were involved, what would he or she repent of in regards to the separation?

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.