Change is afoot in the Catholic Church’s handling of divorced people who have sex within subsequent marriages. Long a point of lay dissent and inconsistent practice, at least in democratic capitalist societies, the teaching on divorce is facing renovation at hands no less magisterial than those of Cardinal Walter Kasper, who has suggested the possibility of procedures for the re-inclusion of sexually-active remarried people in the eucharist for consideration at a bishops’ synod this year.
Theological conservatives within the church have reacted with reassertions, some of them quite stinging, of the ancient and unchanging teaching on marriage and divorce: that marriage is an act of God that cannot be undone, that people who divorce are violating a direct judgment of Jesus, and that those who remarry are obliged to repent and refrain from sex with their new pretended spouse or be excommunicated. Any defection from this teaching, in theory or in practice, is evidence of the church’s surrender to modern mores. A new article by Robert Spaemann in First Things states this case again. “The beauty of the Church’s teaching can shine forth only when it’s not watered down,” Spaemann stipulates. The truth of his statement is laced with a cruel irony.
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