By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
He who vacates reason cannot inhabit faith.
The Synod on the Family is getting underway in Rome and speculation in regard to its outcome continues to build. Change agents continue to agitate for admitting the divorced and civilly married to sacramental Communion.
Media sources have been very successful in stringing along a “trend” by which they appoint themselves players in the news cycle while creating further confusion about the real nature of Catholic faith and sacramental practice. They continue to suggest that the decision to change the Church’s practice of not admitting the divorced and civilly remarried to sacramental Communion has all but been officially decreed.
Events of the past few months recall the fury surrounding the 1968 promulgation of Humanae Vitae, with many clamoring for a change of moral teaching to accommodate the spirit of the times rather than seeking the personal change necessary to follow the clearly explained teaching of the encyclical.
Dissenters organized themselves into “lobbies” to create the illusion of a popular movement and to pressure and encourage others to join their cause. The results for the Church have been devastating with continued consequences for the present and future well-being of the Church and her evangelizing mission.
Cardinal Kasper has been a prime catalyst in the fomenting of new lobbies seeking to morph the Church’s longstanding sacramental practice of not admitting to sacramental Communion anyone who is living in a state of sin due to a sexual relationship outside of sacramental marriage. His commentary and writings in favor of a change in the practice of excluding from Communion those who are divorced and civilly remarried, while insisting that doctrine about indissolubility does not change, verge on the bizarre.
In matters of morals, praxis and doctrine are indistinguishable. To change praxis in regard to morals is in fact to change doctrine. Doctrine does not consist of ink formed into words on the pages of a book, but rather the lived teaching by holy men and women in the Church inspired by the Gospel of Jesus Christ for salvation.
The Church would be hypocritical if she were to insist that some persons marry for life, because it is a truth God teaches about marriage, while making exceptions to that doctrine for other people who, for whatever reasons, refuse to change what is possible in their lives in order to obey it. When the Church no longer lives and teaches the truth of Jesus Christ, the reason for the Church no longer exists.
Loving persons means sharing the truth with them as a necessary element of a relationship with Jesus Christ. The truth about faith and morals cannot change anymore than Jesus Christ can change. Asking Jesus Christ to change while insisting such is necessary in order to have a relationship with Him is irrational. Because faith builds on nature, and grace builds on reason, we must proceed in faith by building only upon reasonable principles.
Cardinal Kasper makes another irrational leap when speaking of “spiritual Communions.” He suggests that if we have been asking people who are divorced and civilly remarried to make a spiritual Communion at Mass, well, then, why don’t we just start inviting them to make a sacramental Communion instead? To suggest on my part that the cardinal doesn’t know the theology and background of the practice of spiritual Communions seems to border on the impertinent, but nevertheless his own words make such necessary.
The Church only asks people to make spiritual Communions in cases where some choice on their part makes it necessary. Whether a Catholic simply refuses to make a sacramental Communion or whether he or she lives in a sexual relationship outside of marriage or uses contraception within a sacramental marriage, these and any number of other reasons may make it necessary for a Catholic to make a spiritual Communion in lieu of a sacramental Communion at a given Mass.
There are adults who live together as brother and sister, of course, whose reception of Communion is not an issue. Marriage is a social sacrament and always with social consequences which therefore always involve the Church. Anyone who publicly enters into a simulated marriage without the Sacrament of Matrimony, whether two men or two women or one man and one woman, cannot practice the sacramental life of the Church until that free choice is addressed. What is freely chosen can be freely renounced for conversion and amendment of life as part of contrition for sin.
I suggest that what may underlie much of the hubbub may in fact be a distrust of the Church and her hard-won traditio of faith and morals. The Church’s faith and praxis have been hammered out together by pastors and faithful through 2,000 of docility to the Holy Spirit. Of the Church’s teaching on marriage and family this is especially so, as there is no other area of her life that more intimately involves the deepest matters of the hearts and lives of the faithful.
All of us who love the Church as the Body of Christ, endowed as she is with the gift of the Spirit, enjoy the grace of trust in her teaching as an exercise of true compassion for the weakness of the human condition called to eternal salvation. Let us pray that this trust born of true faith may spread in our day to bless also those who inhabit a hermeneutic of suspicion and distrust of the Church and so come to know the joy of the Gospel.
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(Follow Fr. Cusick on Facebook at Reverendo Padre-Kevin Michael Cusick and on Twitter @MCITLFrAphorism. Father blogs occasionally at APriestLife.blogspot.com and mcitl.blogspot.com. You can email him at mcitl.blogspot.com@gmail.com.)
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