Theology Archives - Page 5 of 11

Is there any such thing as “natural” marriage?

Catholic response to the recent SCOTUS decision has been varied. Many who have been in the trenches for years were disheartened; some priests have come out in favor of it; one friend of mine suggested a “Jon Duns Scotus rehabilitation project,” because the man deserves to have his name used better. One response has been to minimize the loss: Hey, this Supreme Court thing just has to do with civil marriages, not the sacrament of marriage, so it doesn’t touch our Catholic thing.

That last response is understandable, but wrong. It would be a lot easier if we could write off the direction of our country as “their problem,” but the Catholic Church has always taught that there is such a thing as “natural” marriage, and that sacramental marriage is based on it. (Aside from the obvious go-to, the Catechism, I would recommend reading the first half of Pius XI’s Casti Conubii, a marvelously clear document that has been reaffirmed by subsequent popes.)

The basic challenge is to see that there is such a thing as “natural” marriage. Consider this analogy: Nobody seems to doubt that parents and children are naturally related to each other. What I mean is that no one thinks the parent-child relationship is something we just made up to suit our preferences. The government has to be involved in the relationship, of course, providing inheritance laws and protecting a parent’s special right over the child’s education and the child’s right to support from the parent and so forth and so on, but no one takes the government’s involvement to mean that the government just fabricates this relationship for convenience. We all see that a natural, biological fact relates parent to child and child to parent.

The reason it is particularly clear in the case of parent and child is that the child would not even exist were it not for his special relationship to a parent. If you have these two people, you have this relationship; and if you have this relationship, you have these two people. They aren’t separable, and so everyone can see that the relationship is no more an artificial arrangement than are the people themselves.

The Church’s teaching is that marriage is also a natural relationship, every bit as natural as the parent-child relationship. Once a man and a woman enter into marriage, they are, so to speak, blood relations; they are one flesh, one organism, biologically related. The government has to be involved in the relationship, of course, in order to protect the couple’s ability to live as one, to own property as one, and to inherit should one of them die, and so on, and the government has to arbitrate in cases where a marriage fails so badly that disputes arise over children and property and so on. But the government’s involvement does not mean that the marriage relationship is just fabricated by the government for the sake of preference or convenience.

The reason it is harder to see this relation as natural is that both man and woman exist before the relationship ever begins. Consequently, marriage can seem to be an accidental add-on, like membership at the country club or joining the Girl Scouts of America.

But in the Church’s view, something does exist as soon as the man and the woman exist, something without which the man and the woman would not exist themselves. Men are made in a way that obviously puts them in relation to women and women are made in a way that makes them obviously related to men. Being a man means having a certain relationship to woman, generically, and being a woman means having a certain relationship to man, generically. A man is made incomplete without woman, and a woman is made incomplete without man, each needing the other in a way to be a complete human unit.

What happens at marriage is not that something entirely new is created, but that this man’s generic relationship to woman is narrowed down to this woman, while this woman’s generic relationship to man is specified to this man. General complementarity becomes specific complementarity. This man could not be completed without woman, and now he is completed by this woman; this woman could not be completed without man, and now she is completed by this man. The structure of the relationship is already there, in masculinity and femininity, and the couple enter into that pre-existing structure by making it concrete in themselves.

That pre-existing structure is what the SCOTUS decision has denied, and yet that pre-existing structure is what Jesus took as the basis of the sacrament of marriage. It is precisely because marriage is a certain kind of natural thing that it was able to become a certain kind of supernatural thing.

There is a lot more one could say. The fact that marriage is natural ties in to the fact that society itself is natural, so to deny that natural marriage exists is actually to make a statement about the nature of the United States of America itself. Ultimately, if we push far enough this direction, we may even find ourselves saying that the parent-child relationship is a matter of preference. But for now I just want to make clear the Church’s position: even though a man and a woman enter marriage by willing to do so, their will does not create the nature of the thing they enter.

The key question behind today’s moral debates

As I have thought about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling and about the other moral confusions of our day—is it OK to kill children? can I kill grandma so long as she is helpless? should I have surgery to change me from boy to girl?—I have become steadily more convinced that the root lies far away, where no one would suspect it. You could start somewhere at random, anywhere you please, and there find the key to unlocking all these debates.

Consider my cat as an example. If I glance up and see him, without reflection I think: “A cat!” He seems to be one animal with various parts, including legs, tail, and teeth, that serve his purposes.

But if I look at him more analytically, and especially if I recall my high school biology courses, I recall that he is composed of many systems: muscular system, skeletal system, nervous system, digestive system, and so on and so forth. These systems themselves are composed of a multitude of cells, and the cells in turn are composed of some unimaginable number of atoms, which in turn are composed of something smaller whose name I forget, which in turn is composed of something even smaller whose name maybe nobody knows—but let’s just stop at the level of atoms. My cat is composed of some unimaginable and incomprehensible number of atoms.

The key question is: Which comes first, the atoms or the cat?

In high school, we were taught to think that the atoms come first. On this model, a cat is like a car, a complex system of parts that work so well together as to achieve an appearance of unity. What really exists are nuts and bolts and belts and so on; “car” names the cumulative effect of these parts in relation to each other. Similarly, what really exists are atoms; “cat” names the cumulative effect of the atoms. The atoms are first, and cause the cat. On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance. This is the first and original atom bomb: the one that blew up my cat.

But suppose we turn it around, and say that the cat comes first and the atoms second. On this model, what really exists is one thing, namely a cat, and the atoms are effects arising from that one thing. In this case, the atoms are the sensible radiation or working out of one thing, like the visible glow that testifies to an electric charge in the air. However comprehensible as mechanisms, the various systems in the cat are nothing other than the cat itself working itself out in the mechanical arena. On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

How can we decide which is true? A change in theory would make no difference in the arrangement of atoms, so we can’t leave it to scientific studies or super-duper microscopes or any other version of seeing, touching, feeling, hearing, or smelling. The world around us relentlessly (and unknowingly) advocates that the atoms are first. But how can we decide?

Of all the animals in the world, we have an “insider perspective” on one only: ourselves. Hold up your hands; clap them together. Look with your eyes, and realize that you are looking with two eyes rather than one. You experience yourself as one thing, no matter how many parts you may have; if anyone pokes your hand or your eye, you will say, “You poked me!”

It may seem unscientific or even mystical, but it’s an immediate experience that trumps any later argument: I am first, and my atoms are second.

Does this seem arcane? This one question—which is first, the atoms or the cat?—decides whether moral evil exists, whether we live in our houses, whether we know anything at all. People have no idea.

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. The truth is that the peculiar combination of letters is nothing but a property of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The French or German versions of the play “own” different combinations of letters.

– E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

A secret for reading Laudato Si

Over at Patheos, my good friend Joseph Susanka maintains a blog that people actually read. So it was an honor when he posted (with permission) some words of mine about reading the Pope’s new encyclical, Laudato Si. Feeling in a strange way at one remove from myself, I quote my own words from Joseph’s blog:

I am in the middle of reading the encyclical myself, so I can’t offer you anything detailed yet, but one thought weighs on me as I read.

Everyone who finds the encyclical troubling should start by listing the “I like it” elements and the “This bothers me” elements. Then he should do one more thing: write down at least ONE element in the encyclical that genuinely challenges him, that is, one way in which he feels this encyclical may change his mind on something he has thought for a long time.

The Spirit leads the Church through weak human beings, and yet we have to be on the lookout for God in the midst of it all. As Fulton Sheen once remarked, Jesus Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass. If we don’t make a real effort to find ONE element in an encyclical that changes our attitude or conviction, then we have failed as readers.

Maybe a Catholic makes a real effort and can’t find it. If the effort was real, that’s not a failure: God asks for our ears, not for our accomplishments. But I would be surprised–shocked, even–if most readers could not find at least ONE element in this present document that falls neither in the “I like” or the “I don’t like” columns, but in the column titled, “This hurts in a good way.”

Going to heaven with the Eucharist

Austin Kleon, creativity guru, has this advice for literary types: “Don’t try to write a book while taking care of a newborn baby.” That, of course, is exactly what I have been doing, and the blog has suffered accordingly.

Happily, sometimes a friend steps in to do my work for me. Peter Kwasniewski took some e-mails I wrote to him years ago and reshaped them into the first half of an article on the Eucharist; he sent a draft to me and I made some edits, drafted a new introduction, and ta-da! A new publication.

My own advice for literary types: Always include at least one over-achiever in your circle of advisors.

The objective objection

My previous Kasper post was devoted to his argument based on spiritual communion. Because the Church has said that the divorced and remarried can make a spiritual communion at Mass, Kasper said:

For the one who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ. How can he or she then be in contradiction to Christ’s commandment? Why, then, can’t he or she also receive sacramental communion?

Last time I focused on the nature of a “spiritual communion”. This time I want to look at the second half, where Kasper asks how, if these people are in union with Jesus, can they be in contradiction to Christ’s commandment? Part of the answer is in my last post, where I pointed out that being allowed to make a spiritual communion does not imply that one is in a state of grace. For the rest of the answer, let’s take a look at the language the Church has used on this issue. I’ll put the key phrases in bold print.

In 1981, the bishops of the world had a synod at which they talked about the family and the question was raised: can the divorced and remarried receive communion? The bishops said no, they can’t, and John Paul reported on their conclusion in his post-synodal exhortation Familiaris Consortio:

However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist.

In 1994, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Ratzinger, was compelled to answer proposals for allowing the divorced and remarried to receive communion. Just before quoting the Familiaris Consortio passage given above, the CDF’s letter says: “If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists.”

In 2007, a synod of bishops was held on the Eucharist, and again they discussed whether the divorced and remarried can receive communion, and they again said no. Pope Benedict XVI reported their conclusion in his post-synodal exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis:

The Synod of Bishops confirmed the Church’s practice, based on Sacred Scripture (cf. Mk 10:2- 12), of not admitting the divorced and remarried to the sacraments, since their state and their condition of life objectively contradict the loving union of Christ and the Church signified and made present in the Eucharist.

There are two things to note about the Church’s choice of words. First, the exclusion from communion is based on an objective condition, not on a subjective state of sin or grace. The Church knows well that people who do what are objectively mortal sins are not always subjectively guilty of mortal sin. People might not understand what they do, or they might act under some kind of partial coercion–lots of factors can affect a subjective state. So when the Church excludes DivRem’s from communion, she is not making a blanket statement that everyone who has been divorced and remarried is in a subjective state of mortal sin. The exclusion is based on the easily accessible and objective fact of being divorced and remarried.

Second, we have to notice that this is an objective condition, not a one-time event. Someone could steal or murder or lie or commit some other objectively very bad deed, and yet they get up the next day and they are not stealing or murdering or lying or whatever. It was a deed, not a condition. But if someone went down to the parish and told them to erase his name from the registry because he had rejected the Church, that would be an ongoing condition: he not only did something one day, but as a result he is now in a condition of exclusion from the Church and from communion. He may not even be subjectively guilty for his actions–maybe he was badly catechized and badly treated by a priest and so on–but he still cannot receive communion because of his objective, ongoing condition.

To wrap up, we find two major holes in Kasper’s argument. He says that spiritual communion implies being one with Jesus, which means one cannot be in opposition to his commandment. But we find that spiritual communion does not imply being one with Jesus, and we find that being spiritually one with Jesus is compatible (in some cases) with being in a condition objectively opposed to his commandment. Kasper has not actually addressed what the Church has said on this issue.

But he’s not done. Stay tuned.

Spiritual communion for the divorced and remarried

At long last, we get down to the “Kasper proposal,” which has increasingly stood out in my mind as the real gravitational center of this entire book. Kasper opens by pointing to something the Church has already said:

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith provided a guideline already in 1994 when it declared—and Benedict XVI reiterated it at the World Meeting of Families in Milan in 2012—that the divorced and remarried admittedly cannot receive sacramental communion, but can indeed receive spiritual communion.

The CDF document mentioned here was a letter addressing an earlier incarnation of the Kasper proposal and rejecting it. We’ll return to that letter in the next post. Kasper continues by arguing that this suggestion is not only insufficient but self-contradictory:

Many will be grateful for this statement. But it also raises questions. For the one who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ. How can he or she then be in contradiction to Christ’s commandment? Why, then, can’t he or she also receive sacramental communion?

Within the same paragraph Kasper quickly runs on to new arguments, but let’s stop and consider this first salvo sentence by sentence. His first claim is that “the one who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ.” Stated this way, without qualification, his claim is false.

The reason has to do with what “spiritual communion” means. A “spiritual communion” is a serious and formal desire to receive the sacrament of communion when sacramental reception is unavailable or illicit. If the one person making this act of desire is rightly disposed, God can grant the effects of the sacrament. It is like a “baptism by desire,” only with the Eucharist.

If someone in mortal sin were to make a formal act of desire for the Eucharist, he would not receive the effects of the sacrament any more than someone in mortal sin receiving the sacrament itself would receive the effects of the sacrament. It is simply not true that anyone who makes this act of “spiritual communion” is in union with Jesus Christ, any more than it is true that anyone who saunters through the communion line is in a spiritual union with Jesus Christ.

However, sacramental communion and spiritual communion are different in an important way: in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood of Jesus is an objective reality in the recipient, regardless of whether the one receiving the sacrament is well or badly disposed to receive it. In spiritual communion Jesus is not present in the recipient unless the person is well disposed, and even then he is only present interiorly and invisibly.

Consequently, to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist in mortal sin is a bad thing, both because it treats Christ’s body and blood disrespectfully and because it falsely signifies to others that the believer is in spiritual union with Christ. But making a spiritual communion while in mortal sin is a good thing: not only is there no false outward sign of unity, but making an act of desire for the Eucharist is a good first step toward getting out of mortal sin and back into to union with Christ. So reception of the sacrament in mortal sin makes for more sin, but spiritual communion while in mortal sin disposes one to less sin.

There we have one hole in Kasper’s argument. Next time, we’ll look at the next sentence.

Methinks the Cardinal doth protest too much

After a long hiatus, the blog is back. If you thought I was dead, I hope you have been praying for my soul.

Cardinal Kasper turns his attention to a second situation, namely those who really had valid, sacramental marriages and yet by some tragic circumstance their life partnership is broken and one or both have contracted a second, civil marriage. He begins by warning:

It would be mistaken to seek the resolution of the problem in a generous expansion of the annulment process. The disastrous impression would thereby be created that the Church is proceeding in a dishonest way by granting what, in reality, are divorces.

This is surely right, although I would be hard pressed to find another description of Kasper’s approach to this point as something other than a “generous expansion of the annulment process.” He has suggested that we strip away the judicial process and entrust the whole thing to an individual who knows the people well and will be sympathetic; he offers no account of how this will result in anything but more annulments.

It reminds me of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had a habit of penning the most outrageous theological statements and then appending, “but not in a heretical sense, of course”—leaving his unhappy reader to figure it out. And I know a fellow whose trademark conversational tick is to preface all his potentially upsetting remarks by denying he means to do what he is doing: “I don’t mean this at all to criticize anyone,” but you’re all doing a lousy job; “I don’t mean this at all to disparage what was done before me,” but it nearly wrecked the place.

Already I find it hard to believe Kasper’s protestations of caution. But as we get further into his text, it will get even harder to believe in his sincerity.

Kasper on the annulment process

As Cardinal Kasper pursues the situation of re-married Catholics whose first marriages might be invalid, he asks whether we could change the way we decide questions of validity. Noting that the decision can’t just rest on the subjective judgment of the parties concerned, he urges:

However, one can ask whether the judicial path, which is in fact not iure divino [by divine law], but has developed in the course of history, can be the only path to the resolution of the problem, or whether other, more pastoral and spiritual procedures are conceivable.

Kasper does not elaborate on what these procedures might be, but a bit further on he recalls Pope Francis’ remarks that behind every judicial proceeding there stand persons who expect justice. He asks, rhetorically:

Therefore, can it really be that decisions are made about the weal and woe of people at a second and a third hearing only on the basis of records, that is, on the basis of paper, but without knowledge of the persons and their situation?

Kasper is surely within the bounds of propriety to ask whether we could improve our canonical proceedings. They are not infallible or impeccable. However, I am unclear as to what Kasper wants known about the “persons and their situation”. A one-sentence suggestion may shed some light on what Kasper is thinking here:

Alternatively, one might imagine that the bishop could entrust this task to a priest with spiritual and pastoral experience as a penitentiary or episcopal vicar.

The direction Kasper would like to take seems to be toward a more intimate knowledge of the people and the little details of their life so that a decision could be made in light of a fuller understanding of the couple. I see two of problems with this, one theoretical and one practical.

At the theoretical level, Kasper’s proposed direction seems to change the nature of the decision sought. The canonical proceeding is about discerning whether a marriage is valid or not valid, that is, it’s about discovering a truth. To discover what’s true, you want to have both sides argued carefully, which usually means in writing, and you want to limit your consideration somewhat to avoid being chasing irrelevancies.

Kasper’s proposed direction recasts the decision sought as a practical deliberation about what should be done: the couple’s present situation does not change the truth of whether they are married, but it does change what they should do in light of that truth. If the Church’s effort is not to discover the truth about a sacrament but to decide what to do with people then Kasper’s proposal makes sense: if a judge is not only trying to decide guilt or innocence but also trying to decide on a sentence for the condemned, then knowing their present situation and the details of their life may be relevant. However, this recasting of the nature of the process seems off to me: the Church is not in fact trying to decide what to do with people, or “sentence” them to this or that. She’s just trying to find out what is the truth about a sacrament.

At the practical level, I think Kasper’s proposed direction shows a one-sided train of thought. If we only think about a spouse who fell into a pseudo-marriage that turned abusive, but who later found happiness in a second relationship and just needs release from the fictitious first marriage—in these situations, a series of intimate conversations leading to mercy sounds great. But when we consider perhaps a spouse who found meaning in life through her marriage, through her beloved, and now is unwilling to say to the world that what they had together was only a pretense—in this case, reducing the case to her husband’s present misery seems unjust. It needs a proceeding, a real investigation. Kasper presents his suggestions all from the side of those who want an annulment and never from the side of those who don’t want their marriage annulled.

And his one specific suggestion sounds like a disaster to me. When stakes and emotions are high, what you want to do is to have transparency and objective policies, not to put some individual judge on the spot for making people miserable or happy. The pressures on the judge become unbearable, and it becomes too likely that the party with the most winning personality will prevail. I’ve been in those situations. To riff on Kasper’s complaint, can it really be that decisions will be made about the weal and woe of people only on the basis of one priest’s unmonitored judgment?

Stepping back from the details, I am troubled to see how Kasper wants to tip the annulment process toward a deliberation about what to do instead of a deliberation about what is true. It plants a seed of doubt in my mind about whether Kasper truly believes that marriage is indissoluble.

Kasper on the presumptio iuris

Cardinal Kasper takes up the question of divorced and remarried Catholics under two headings: (1) those whose first marriages are actually invalid and (2) those whose first marriages are actually valid. For both headings he notes that “solutions are already mentioned in the official documents” of the Church, but he wants to inquire about new directions. Over the next few posts, I’ll crawl through his text more or less paragraph by paragraph.

First he considers those who are subjectively convinced that their first marriage was invalid. Noting that people have to understand certain things in order to give a valid consent to marriage, he asks:

But can we, in the present situation, presuppose without further ado that the engaged couple shares the belief in the mystery that is signified by the sacrament and that they really understand and affirm the canonical conditions for the validity of their marriage? Is not the praesumptio iuris [presumption of validity], from which canon law proceeds, often a fictio iuris [legal fiction]?

He may be right about the situation we face. Our culture militates strongly against understanding marriage as a lifelong commitment for the sake of children, and it would not surprise me a bit to find that most Catholics entering marriage are basically on track with the surrounding culture.

But what argument does he make from that premise? It’s hard to tell what he means to assert, because the whole thing is structured as a vague rhetorical question. It looks as though he is arguing that we should change the presumption on which canon law proceeds. In an annulment case, the marriage is presumed valid until proven otherwise; Kasper seems to be saying marriage is in such a bad state these days that it’s just unrealistic to start by presuming that a marriage is valid, as though that were the typical situation we will see.

Maybe that’s not what he’s saying. But if that is what he’s saying, then I think he’s misunderstanding or misrepresenting what a “presumption” means in law. A “presumption” in law is not based on the statistical likelihood of something being true but on a decision we make about what kind of mistakes our legal system should favor. That is to say, every legal system run by human beings is going to make mistakes, so we have to decide which direction we want the mistakes to go.

For example, in the American legal system the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. We don’t make this presumption because we think or know that a majority of defendants are innocent. We know that our legal system will tilt either toward letting guilty people go free or toward punishing innocent people, both of which are bad, and on the whole we would rather let guilty people go free than punish innocent people. We would rather fail to impose justice on some people than impose injustice on others. So we put the burden of proof on the accuser rather than on the defendant.

Similarly, when a canon law process begins by presuming that a marriage is valid until proven otherwise, this is not based on the statistical likelihood that a given marriage is valid. We make a decision: granted that our canon law courts will make mistakes, would we rather the mistakes go toward insisting a marriage is valid when it isn’t or toward declaring that marriage doesn’t exist when it actually does? Would we rather (a) risk making someone in a miserable situation bear the miserable situation unnecessarily, or would we rather (b) risk telling someone it’s OK to have sexual relations with a person who is not really that person’s spouse? Neither option is good, but we can’t pretend that we won’t make mistakes, so we have to think this through. The presumption in favor of validity is one way of tilting toward (a).

My point in this post is not to settle which option we should favor, but just to point out what’s really going on beneath Kasper’s argument. It doesn’t make sense to change the presumption of validity as an concession to reality, as though the presumption were a statement about probability. The real issue is this: should we sometimes mistakenly make people suffer, or should we sometimes mistakenly encourage people toward objectively wrong actions?

Stepping back from details, I am puzzled by the fact that Kasper never offers an extended reflection on how to prepare people for marriage. If the big crisis is that most Catholics entering marriage don’t have sufficient comprehension of what they are doing to contract a valid marriage, shouldn’t we brainstorm how to change that? Or does saying with Pope Francis that the Church is “a field hospital after battle” mean we have to wait for people to get hurt before we go to work? Surely not, but I don’t think I’m tracking how Kasper decided what to write about.

Kasper chapter 5: Setting the stage

As Cardinal Kasper begins his chapter on the problem of the divorced and remarried, he expresses an intention of playing by the rules:

What can the Church do in such situations? It cannot propose a solution apart from or contrary to Jesus’ words. The indissolubility of a sacramental marriage and the impossibility of contracting a second sacramental marriage during the lifetime of the other partner is a binding part of the Church’s faith, which one cannot repeal or water down by appealing to a superficially understood and cheapened sense of mercy.

Pointing to the Church’s development of doctrine regarding religious freedom as an example of how she can move forward without contradicting what came before, he asks:

Is not a further development possible with regard to our issue too—a development that does not repeal the binding faith tradition, but carries forward and deepens more recent traditions?

For these statements, I am grateful. Many people in our day enter the arena with an explicit hermeneutic of rupture that makes conversation nearly impossible. Kasper may in fact embrace what amounts to a rupture with the past, but at least one can point to these words of his and make a case.

Since his book was meant to prepare the way for the bishops’ synod on marriage, one other “rule” seems to me implicit in his task: he should be speaking to bishops. That is to say, this should not be a book directed at the masses, at the laity and at various constituencies, but at his fellow bishops and cardinals. His fellow bishops are intelligent and well-read men, theologically trained, but Kasper has written lots of academic pieces in the past and certainly has the chops to do something at a high level.

From that point of view, I would have to criticize the book as it has gone to this point. Its complexity is at about the level of the Catechism, often following the Catechism in its points and how it develops them. I would have expected a somewhat higher level of discourse. Not a disaster, but it causes me to wonder what audience is foremost in his mind.

Lastly, just before we get into the nitty-gritty, I would have to add that chapter 5 sticks out a bit from the rest of the book. He began the book by saying he did not want to deal with the various well-known problems that make the news but rather to present the “gospel of the family,” the “good news,” and he pursued this intention by commenting on Scripture. Along the way he mentioned a few aspects of the current crisis, especially the disintegration of the family and the general loss of faith among Catholics, but he did not give extended attention to any one issue.

Until now. In a book that doesn’t set out to treat deeply of any one problem, here we have a chapter that’s all about one problem and how Kasper proposes to fix it. It just stands out from the design of the whole book in an awkward way, and it raises questions for me:

Why not talk about all those Catholics who are practicing contraception and receiving the Eucharist in sin? According to current discipline, they shouldn’t receive communion any more than the divorced and remarried. Is it because preachers aren’t preaching about it and the faithful aren’t worked up about it, so it somehow isn’t a problem?

Why not focus on that amazing loss of faith he describes and talk and length about how to remedy that? Isn’t that the root issue?

I don’t mean to imply that these are whopper-stopper, unanswerable questions. I just mean to highlight that the design of the book comes across in some ways as a long and quickly-written introduction to chapter 5 on the divorced and remarried. This chapter is where he’s really talking to his fellow bishops.