Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
March 30, 2007
After Pope Benedict published his exhortation “The Sacrament of Love” two weeks ago, one of the major newspapers within the Diocese wrote a provocative editorial focusing on one of the document’s 97 paragraphs. Entitled “Pope’s hard line drives faithful away,” it argued that the Holy Father “perhaps” is “aiming” to “drive people, especially Americans, away” by his reiteration of the Church’s two thousand year-old practice that divorced-and-remarried believers are not permitted to receive Holy Communion. Such a teaching, it wrote, just like the Church’s teachings on married priests, gay marriage, birth control, and “other facts of American life” are “leading some American Catholics to withdraw from organized religion.” The danger, it warns both Benedict and local Catholics, is that the Church will continue to “los[e] influence in the United States” and that will make its “charitable” and “saintly work,” like the Church is doing “to alleviate the human suffering caused by the recent immigration raid in New Bedford, … harder to do.”
The assumptions on which the editorial’s arguments are based are not new. The first is that the Church’s more unpopular — we’d say prophetic — moral teachings are “driving” faithful away. While there’s no doubt that some Catholics have chosen to stop practicing the faith because they no longer choose to practice what the Church teaches, the implication is that if the Church somehow softened or changed her teachings on these controversial issues in American life, the Church would better maintain its numbers and clout. Yet one glance at those ecclesial communities in the United States that have adopted permissive teachings whenever the modern sensibilities of their members have contradicted explicit Gospel teaching or traditional Christian practice should be enough to correct this line of thought. Recent comparative statistics on church membership in our country show clearly that those denominations that seek to adhere more strictly to Biblical and traditional teachings are numerically withstanding the onslaught of secularism far better than those denominations that seek to accommodate preaching to practice.
The second assumption is more serious — and more mistaken. It’s often implied that the Church’s “hard line” on issues like divorce-and-remarriage contradicts the “love” shown by the Church toward the poor and the needy. By the first, the Church treats people as “outcasts,” as the editorial charges; in the second, the Church welcomes and cares for outcasts. The truth is that the Church’s teaching and the Church’s practice are both “sacraments of love.” In each, the Church is expressing its faithfulness and love toward Christ and trying to love others with the same charity with which Christ loved them.
With regard to the issue of those who are divorced-and-remarried, the Church’s practice is based not on some harsh, mutable, man-made teaching, but on the very words of Love and Truth personified. The question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?,” was once asked Jesus explicitly. Those who asked it said that Moses, the greatest religious authority they had up until then, had allowed them to do so. Jesus’ response, which seems to have been forgotten by many Christian denominations as well as some Catholics, deserves to be quoted at length:
“Jesus said to them, ‘It was because of your hardness of heart [Moses] wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery’”(Mk 10:2-12).
Jesus himself teaches clearly that those who remarry after divorce are committing adultery against their spouse to whom they have been united in one flesh by God until death. It almost goes without saying that God considers adultery a very serious sin. Not committing adultery was explicitly named by him as one of the ten commandments, one of the ten most important ways for human beings to show that they are in fact living in a covenant of love with God and with others. Because of its destructive force within families and within society, it was one of the sins for which the death penalty was associated in Old Testament times (Lev 20:10).
Some people may think that, because of his merciful interaction with the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8), Jesus somehow mitigated the sinfulness of adultery because he said that he did not “condemn” the woman. But in telling her “Go and sin no more,” he was both stating explicitly its sinful character and her need to avoid that sin in the future. Jesus gave this command out of love, because, in two very real senses, adultery still carries a death penalty. The first is that it led to Jesus’ death; out of justice, Jesus didn’t and couldn’t mitigate the sinfulness of adultery but out of mercy took the place of adulterers on death row. Secondly, adultery remains what St. John later called a “mortal” sin (1 Jn 5:16). If done with deliberation and consent, it is one of those actions that will lead to an eternal death unless one repents and comes to seek God’s forgiveness.
This reality of sharing in Christ’s merciful love for those caught in a situation of adultery is one of the important foundations for the Church’s practice of not permitting those Catholics who are divorced-and-remarried to receive Holy Communion. If the Church were to allow those in this situation to receive Holy Communion, then they and others would be led to believe either that one can now receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin, or that adultery is no longer a mortal sin, or both. To be in communion with Jesus Christ — which is what the action of receiving the Eucharist signifies and effects – means to be in communion with his teachings, even and especially when they are challenging.
Pope Benedict’s exhortation is not a stone that he is throwing at Catholics who are divorced and remarried, but a “sacrament of love,” an external sign of Christ’s own mercy. Like Christ, his earthly vicar compassionately acknowledges the very difficult circumstances in which many Catholics find themselves, and like Christ he states the truth out of love and seeks to help them turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel, so that they might come into genuine communion with the Lord in this life and, even more importantly, in the next.