The End of Annulments

Back in May, I offered some general comments on the question of communion for divorced and remarried Catholics — which looms over the Synod on the Family scheduled for this autumn in Rome, and may represent one of the defining controversies of Pope Francis’s pontificate — and then wrote what was intended to be the first of two posts addressing Cardinal Walter Kasper’s high-profile case for admitting the remarried to the sacrament. That post offered theological and sociological reasons to be skeptical of Kasper’s broad suggestion, offered in an interview with the editors of Commonweal, that Catholic marriage generally is in a crisis more severe even than divorce statistics would suggest, in which (he argued) possibly as many as half of all Catholic marriages are actually invalid. The second post, which I promised and then didn’t deliver, was supposed to be a detailed response to his specific proposal on communion, which he first presented in remarks to his fellow cardinals in the winter and then elaborated again in the Commonweal interview this spring.

Now I’m going to try to finally deliver that response — but in a slightly different form than I originally envisioned, because there’s a new critical assessment of Kasper’s argument, written by a group of American Dominicans, that covers the theological and historical issues in much greater detail and with a far deeper grounding in the relevant material than anything I’m likely to write here. Readers interested in the the subject — whether as Catholics or Christians or simply because they want to understand why the adoption of Kasper’s proposal could lead to an internal crisis in the life of the planet’s largest religious body — should really turn to that assessment first. Readers interested in my own, more non-expert thoughts, meanwhile, can forge ahead. (And readers who think I’m returning to this subject on this particular week because I can’t come up with a clear opinion on the latest Obamacare debate should turn to my spokesman, Francis Urquhart, for a definitive response.)