By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
The feast day of Blessed Karl of Austria landed on the calendar providentially during the final week of the Synod in Rome on the Family. His cause for canonization in process and no doubt one of the signposts for the movement to declare him a saint were his words to his wife Empress Zita on the day after their nuptials, when he said, “Now, we will help each other to get to Heaven.”
In a few words, here precisely is what we hope the synod will teach about in marriage in continuity with the witness of Blessed Karl and all those before and after who understand the beautiful meaning and purpose of holy matrimony in Jesus Christ.
All has not been pacific at the Synod on the Family: A group of cardinals and bishops sent a letter to the Pope questioning procedures for the synod, the opinions of some cardinals and bishops have been openly opposed by other cardinals and bishops — which is to say it is a synod much like other synods. What is different this time is that the media and social networks are exhaustively analyzing every detail for its significance, finding some where there is none.
America magazine published a polemical article on October 18 which attempted to perpetuate the narrative that some of the bishops at the synod are opposed to Pope Francis. They interviewed Donald Cardinal Wuerl on this theme. The only problem with this thesis, which makes the petty claim that some people oppose the Pope because they “just don’t like” him, is that saying people who “oppose Pope Francis” associate him thus with error for it is that which is opposed and not persons.
Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., pursued a more helpful line by asserting, after being slanderously associated with an imagined group of prelates who are oppose to Pope Francis simply “because they don’t like him,” that the papal welcome in Philadelphia disproves such gossip. “If the welcome we gave Pope Francis in Philadelphia last month looked like ‘opposition’,” he said, “people need a trip to a really good eye doctor.”
The differences of opinion among bishops at the synod and the writings of the Holy Father in favor of a decentralized Church in Evangelii Gaudium seemed to threaten a “Balkanization” of the Church. Here is n. 32 of the encyclical:
“Since I am called to put into practice what I ask of others, I too must think about a conversion of the papacy. It is my duty, as the Bishop of Rome, to be open to suggestions which can help make the exercise of my ministry more faithful to the meaning which Jesus Christ wished to give it and to the present needs of evangelization. Pope John Paul II asked for help in finding ‘a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.’
“We have made little progress in this regard. The papacy and the central structures of the universal Church also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion. The Second Vatican Council stated that, like the ancient patriarchal Churches, episcopal conferences are in a position ‘to contribute in many and fruitful ways to the concrete realization of the collegial spirit.’
“Yet this desire has not been fully realized, since a juridical status of episcopal conferences which would see them as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority, has not yet been sufficiently elaborated. Excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach” (emphases mine).
The Pope’s concern for decentralization has led to surmise on the part of some observers that the Synod on the Family might act to implement this “specific attribution” by giving local episcopal conferences the theoretical permission to admit to sacramental Communion some who are living in objective contradiction to faith and morals, such as the divorced and remarried.
The Holy Father’s desire to imbue the local conferences of bishops with “specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority” would need to be further defined. Since Catholic doctrine in essence cannot change they would not be “discovering” new doctrines. Also, since the bishops, each in his own diocese, are already authentic sources of teaching in faith and morals without immediate reference to the person of the Pope they, in a sense, already possess an authority which could be said to be doctrinal in authority, tasked as they are with teaching, sanctifying, and governing the people of God with a mandate from Christ the Lord Himself.
In light of the German lobby headed by Walter Cardinal Kasper to give Communion to some divorced and remarried Catholics and the opposition to this novelty on the part of the Polish bishops, Archbishop Chaput stated, “What amounts to a sacrilege for a person in one country can’t be a source of grace for exactly the same person in another country.”
Reinhard Cardinal Marx, also taking the part of the those German bishops in the Kasper camp, was at loggerheads with Cardinal Pell in the final week of the synod, saying that he and those like him who refuse to change sacramental practice lacked a “spirit of cooperation.”
As I asked in response via Twitter, “Does Marx’s so-called ‘spirit of cooperation’ have anything to do with Christ’s ‘Spirit of truth’ which calls for our cooperation/obedience?” The episode reminds of the conversation between St. Thomas More and Norfolk in the biopic A Man for all Seasons when Norfolk asks More to “come along with us for fellowship’s sake” and More responds: “When you to Heaven for following your conscience and I go to Hell for following mine, will you come along with me for fellowship’s sake?”
(Editor’s Note: Just as we went to press on October 22, Catholic News Agency reported: “In the final paragraph of their document, the German bishops suggest that ‘a path of reflection and penance…in conversation with the confessor, contribute to the personal formation of conscience and to a clarification to what extent access to the sacraments is possible’ for couples in these divorced-remarried situations. This idea of the ‘gift of discernment,’ the bishops said, comes from St. John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio, paragraph 84.” But the German bishops, CNA reports, did not include the rest of that paragraph reaffirming Church practice of not allowing the divorced-remarried to receive Communion.)
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