Bad Parenting: Why The Ban Against Communion for Divorced and Remarried Catholics Is Unjust and 3 Ways to Fix It.

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In all the debate about what should be done to help those Catholics who have divorced and remarried without the benefit of an annulment, there is one solution I have not heard debated.

Let’s Be Honest… 

I agree that it is seriously problematic to allow those who have remarried without the benefit of an annulment to receive communion for the reasons I have mentioned elsewhere.   But let’s face it, Did the vast majority of people who are on this path choose it knowingly and consciously?  Did the vast majority of people who were struggling with the pain of divorce really one day say, “Screw it.  I am going to choose to live an adulterous life in an invalid second marriage.  I don’t care if it means that I can’t take communion again!  BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Of course not.

Bad Parenting

Most people who find themselves on this path got there because of poor formation, terrible catechesis, and simple ignorance about how the Church really thinks about marriage, why it thinks that way, and the practical significance of all this high-level thinking to their actual daily lives as Christians.  Is it really just to hold them accountable for failing to live out principles that were never communicated to them–or at least were never communicated adequately to them–in the first place?  To bar these couples from communion is a bit like a neglectful parent refusing to communicate the house rules to her children only to impose a consequences after the fact.  “You shouldn’t have been playing ball in the house.  You’re grounded for two weeks and you lose your ball!”  “But mom! You never told me I couldn’t play in the house!”  “Tough.  You should have known better.”

Such lousy parenting is unbecoming of any parent, including our Spiritual Mother, the Church.  I think many of the Synod Fathers intuit this, and their sense of guilt around the poor catechesis and formation they have given the faithful drives a desire to be lenient on the back end of the process to make up for the Church’s failures to communicate on the front end of the process.  But this too is terrible parenting.  It’s the equivalent of telling a child, “Well, you shouldn’t have been playing in the house but I never told you that so I can’t give you a consequence for it.  For that matter, I can never  ask you to refrain from playing in the house in the future.”

So what can be done?

(Spiritual) Parent Effectiveness Training

To return to our parenting analogy, in the above example, the only just solution is for the parent to go to the misbehaving child and say, “Listen, I am truly sorry for not having told you what my expectations are.  Because of that, I can’t punish you for breaking the window by playing ball in the house.  In fact, I am going to clean up this mess with you.  But moving forward, I promise to do a much better job telling you what my expectations are and why.  In return,  you will need to do a really good job of listening so that if you mess up again, you’ll understand what the consequences are all about.”

In this scenario, 95% of the responsibility falls to the parent to apologize for his or her neglect, map out a plan for the future and communicate that plan along with any future consequences that might need to be imposed to maintain a peaceful and orderly home.

What does this mean to the Church’s approach to divorced and remarried persons.  I would suggest the following.

3 Steps to Bringing Our Children Home.

1.  Share Responsibility for Cleaning Up the Mess.  Allow fast-track annulments on the (newly developed) grounds of poor catechesis/inadequate formation. A valid marriage requires consent but you can’t give full consent if you don’t know what you’re consenting to.  If a couple could demonstrate that they really were not taught by their pastors, catechists, or parents how to practically understand and live the Catholic vision of love, sex and marriage and/or they had no intention of living this Catholic difference in their own marriage then they should be granted a speedy annulment of their first marriage.   Pope Benedict XVI recommended something similar to this.  Frankly, while I am not a canonist (and at the risk of irritating those who are) I imagine that this could potentially be handled similarly to “lack of form” annulments (e.g., when a Catholic gets married in a non-Catholic church without permission f the bishop) which are typically the easiest and fastest annulments to grant. All the couple would have to do is fill out a form that describes their understanding of marriage at the time of their first wedding.  It would be pretty easy to assess their capacity to live what the Church means by marriage.  Validity wouldn’t necessarily require some theologically developed answer on the part of couples.   Something along the lines of “I understood that God chose this person for me so that we could help each other be better Christians and help each other get to heaven.”  would be sufficient to establish an ability to consent to the Church’s vision of marriage.

Following this, they would need to go through a marriage catechumenate (see #3 below) in order to have their second marriage convalidated.

As far as communion goes, to maintain both the integrity of the sacrament and to be as generous as possible to couples who were in this process, bishops could grant permission to couples to be admitted to communion even before the annulment process was complete based upon their own assessment and/or the pastor’s recommendation of the sincerity of the couple and the veracity  and validity of their response to the initial assessment.  The determination by a bishop or designated pastor of a “founded hope” that the annulment would be granted  would be sufficient grounds for readmission to communion.    This places the responsibility on the Church to move the process along instead of making the faithful responsible for delays in the juridical process.

2.  Formators Called to Penance.  The fact that so many couples are completely ignorant of the Catholic vision of marriage and would not be able to articulate the basic statement I wrote above is–quite simply–the fault of our spiritual “parents”: our bishops, pastors, catechists, and family life ministers.  The church should ask all people who are responsible for marriage preparation to do  penance for failing the faithful.  They should be asked to fast and engage in other mortifications in order to make reparations for their dereliction of duty and to remind themselves that they must do better in the future.  Their penance would be an act of generosity to married couples, a display of authentic mercy, and it would communicate a commitment to do a better job forming the next generation of Catholic families.  Most importantly, it would place the responsibility for the current mess squarely where it belongs.  Not on the poorly formed faithful, but the failed formators.

3.  Initiate Marriage Catechumenate.  Marriage prep as we know it should be scrapped and replaced with a marriage catechumenate.  This is one of the best ideas I have heard coming out of the synod. NCRegister explains this idea here but the short version is that a marriage catechumenate is a longer period of preparation that emphasizes the role of marriage in living a Christian life.  This would be a HUGE gift to couples and would contribute mightily to challenging the divorce culture in and outside of the Church. It would also go a long way to helping to form “intentional disciples” that is, adults who understood how to bring their faith into their homes and out into the world so that God could both open their hearts to his grace and enable Catholic couples to be an effective witness in the world.

I don’t pretend to have the final and/or best answer to the serious challenges the Synod Fathers are facing.  But I believe that the above represents a more authentic approach to merciful pastoral care than is being presented by some of the more progressive elements in the Synod.

In the meantime, if you would like to undergo your own marriage catechumenate and learn what it takes to fully and joyfully live the Catholic difference in your marriage, check out the all new, revised and expanded edition of For Better…FOREVER! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage, Just Married: The Catholic Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the First 5 Years of Marriage, and Holy Sex!  The Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving.

 

OUTRAGE! Divorce, Remarriage and Getting Kicked Out of the Catholic Hospital.

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I had a conversation with a reporter yesterday from a prominent newspaper about the ongoing Synod on the Family.  We had a great discussion and I appreciated her time.  In particular, we talked a lot about people who felt alienated from the Church (and those who are divorced and remarried in particular).  The conversation left me in a thoughtful mood. In particular, I was left reflecting on the question, “Why, exactly, do so many people feel excluded by the Church–especially those who are divorced and remarried–and what can we do about it?”

Missing the Mission.

People’s anger at the Church is real and deserves to be met with respect and compassion.  At the same time, it appears to me that a lot of the anger and pain is caused by confusion about what Church is and what it’s meant to do.  In order to appropriately address people’s hurt, I think we, as Church, need to do a better job of communicating our mission.  What does that mean?

The Church as Hospital

Pope Francis noted that the Church is a hospital.  That sounds very affirming and it is. But what people forget is that you only need to go to the hospital if you’re sick.  At the point when you think you’re healthy, you either don’t need the hospital or you have to leave it.

The problem–in our metaphor of Church as hospital–is that, these days, a lot of people come to the hospital because they think it is a nice building with a lot of interesting equipment in it and they want to explore the various rooms. Eventually, they bump into a doctor. Mistaking them for a patient, he asks what’s wrong with them.  They become offended and exclaim,  “How dare you say there is something wrong with me?!?”  The doctor stares at the erstwhile patient and, in all innocence, says, “Well then, if you aren’t sick, then what are you doing here? You’re not just trespassing are you?”  And the person screams, “How dare you try to exclude me!”

What’s Your Diagnosis?

The Church is far from perfect, but too often people who assert that they are alienated from the Church feel that way primarily because the Church necessarily insists that to be a member you have to be willing to admit that you (1) are spiritually sick, (2) that you need a diagnosis (i.e., “sinner”),  and (3) that you must be willing to participate in the treatment.  If you aren’t willing to do those things, you really have no business taking beds and food away from the patients who are lining up in the hall waiting to be admitted.  If you’re really so healthy, what are you doing playing with the IV’s?  Go, live your life! Be happy!

It isn’t that people’s anger at the Church isn’t real and doesn’t deserve to be respected, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Church is really only for people who are willing to see it as the place where they get diagnosed and treated for the spiritual diseases that are preventing them from receiving the gift of eternal life.

Marriage:  Here’s Your Sign…

As I mentioned above, much of my conversation with the reporter focused, specifically, on the fact that Catholics who have remarried after divorce feel excluded from the Church.  This is a profoundly sad and painful reality.  But to understand why these couples are not admitted to communion, you need to understand that the Church thinks of marriage differently than the world does.  While the Church certainly values the earthly benefits of marriage, the Church primarily values marriage because of what it points toward.  Marriage is meant to be an icon to the world;  a physical sign of the kind of unconditional, committed love God wants to share with each of us (Eph 5:31-32).  The fact that God wants this kind of relationship with us is a mind-blowing concept.  It’s hard to get our heads around it.  We need some kind of experience–some physical sign– that shows us this sort of love is even possible.  This is where marriage comes in.  The Church intends sacramental marriage to be a sign to the world that the kind of love God wants to share with us really is possible.

A Broken Sign

When the Church says that there is something wrong with remarriage after divorce (without the benefit of an annulment) it isn’t saying that the couple can’t somehow manage to be happy together or that there is anything (necessarily) wrong with that couple’s relationship from a worldly POV.  It is,  however,  saying that that the couples’ “sign” is broken.  That is, they cannot adequately represent to the world the faithful love that Bridegroom Christ has for the his Bride, the Church.    That really isn’t a judgment against the couple.  It is a spiritual diagnosis.  Having broken communion in their marriage, the divorced and remarried Catholic (who has not sought the benefit of an annulment) now becomes a de facto sign of the broken communion that exists when we are unfaithful to the Christ, the Bridegroom.  People who have remarried after divorce without the benefit of an annulment are still very much welcome in church, but their lives now becomes a visible sign of the alienation we experience when we are unfaithful to the Bridegroom–as we often are.  This is a very painful reality but it is not a judgment on divorced and remarried couples.  Rather, it is an acknowledgment that the sign they are attempting to live through their remarriage is, in fact, seriously broken and that they are in need of healing.  The Church is eager to do whatever is possible to facilitate that healing and so she welcomes the divorce and remarried person just like she welcomes any other patient to the hospital, not with judgment, but with a diagnosis and a treatment plan.

A Painful Course of Treatment

Because it cuts right through the heart of the primary image God uses to reveal his love for the Church, remarriage after divorce (without the benefit of an annulment) is a particularly serious spiritual disorder.  Currently, there are only two treatment options; either the couple can embrace the penance of living as brother and sister unless or until they can receive a declaration of nullity for the original and still valid marriage, or the couple can embrace the penance of being that broken sign and refrain from communion.  These are painful treatments, but as any cancer patient can tell you, treatments for serious illnesses are often quite painful.  Again, the treatment is not a judgment on the couple.  It is a recognition of the seriousness of the spiritual disorder.

Asking Important Questions

I understand that a lot of people don’t get this.  They feel judged, and that’s a very serious problem.  Frankly, the Church has done a horrible job communicating these truths and this is one thing the Synod is attempting to address.   One importnat question the Synod Fathers are asking is, “Is there a way that we can continue to do our job of diagnosing and providing treatment for spiritual disorders–such as remarriage after divorce–without making people feel judged by our diagnoses?” Another question is, “Are there treatments for this disorder (of remarriage after divorce) that could work as well but be less painful?”   These are important but challenging questions, and there aren’t an easy answers to either of them–hence all the sturm und drang around the synod.   But one thing the Church cannot do is say that a spiritual sickness is actually a sign of health, and a broken sign is, actually, not broken.

To learn more about how you can experience a more joyful, loving, passionate, grace-filled marriage, please check out the brand new, revised and expanded 2nd edition or For Better…FOREVER! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage.