Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Pope has tried to wave through communion for divorced-and-remarried

Pope Francis has just given implicit permission for many divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion. But he’s done so surreptitiously. Effectively, Francis has pulled a fast one on conservative cardinals who didn’t want the rules changed. Very fast, in this case.

On 5 September, he received a copy of draft guidelines, written by the bishops of Buenos Aires, on giving communion to people in ‘irregular’ marriages. They were extremely liberal – off the charts in Catholic terms. The Pope gave them a ringing endorsement on the same day.

That’s a big deal. But the whole business of communion for the divorced-and-remarried has become so complicated that this latest twist has gone largely unreported. The best attempt to unravel it all can be found here, in Crux magazine.

Here are the guidelines and the Pope’s letter. Ross Douthat of the New York Times has spotted the story; he reckons that Francis, having tried ‘by hook or by crook’ to get the world’s bishops to back his liberal stance, and failed, is now using devious methods to circumvent traditional teaching, effectively leaving Catholicism ‘with two teachings on marriage and the sacraments’.

The Argentine bishops’ guidelines were an interpretation of Amoris Laetitia, the Pope’s 200-page ‘exhortation’ on the subject of marriage published in March. Amoris Laetitia appeared to uphold the Church’s traditional rule that Catholics in second marriages can’t receive communion unless the first marriage has been annulled or they agree to live with their spouse ‘like brother and sister’ (i.e., not having sex). I say ‘appeared’, because the exhortation – couched in loose and clunky prose, like everything Francis writes – was evasive on this particular question.

Douthat is surely right that the Pope planned to relax the rules dramatically, but last year’s synod of bishops sent him a clear message that it wanted the communion ban upheld. Having called the synod, Francis had backed himself into a corner. There were, however, a few ambiguities in Amoris Laetitia – deliberate ones, we can now see – that allowed liberals to argue that, if you read between the lines, the Pope had changed the rules.

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