IT’S been 18 months since Pope Francis invited Cardinal Walter Kasper to raise anew the argument that divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive communion. That invitation touched off a civil war within the church’s hierarchy, pitting cardinal against cardinal, theologian against theologian; the conflict has reverberated across books, speeches, and op-ed pages, and it’s dominated the church’s synod on the family, whose second meeting looms this fall.
It’s clear that this was all intentional: That Francis wanted a big internal argument over marriage and communion, that he deliberately started this civil war.
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