VATICAN CITY
Catholic Herald (UK)
The group provided detailed suggestions for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics who want to receive the sacraments
When presenting its third synod report, the German-language group has said its members felt called to admit that “in an ill-conceived attempt to respect the doctrine of the Church, repeatedly we have had harsh and merciless pastoral attitudes that created suffering, especially for unwed mothers and child born out of wedlock,” cohabiting couples, homosexual persons and those who are divorced and civilly remarried.
“As bishops in our Church, we ask forgiveness,” said the report approved by the group’s members, who include Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Walter Kasper, a theologian and former president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
The German-speaking group also provided detailed suggestions for responding to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics who want to receive the sacraments but, members said, “the discussions demonstrated that there are no simple and general solutions.”
They cited St John Paul II’s statement in the 1981 exhortation Familiaris Consortio, that pastors “must know that, for the sake of truth, they are obliged to exercise careful discernment of situations. There is in fact a difference between those who have sincerely tried to save their first marriage and have been unjustly abandoned, and those who through their own grave fault have destroyed a canonically valid marriage. Finally, there are those who have entered into a second union for the sake of the children’s upbringing, and who are sometimes subjectively certain in conscience that their previous and irreparably destroyed marriage had never been valid.”
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