Is Pope Francis Really Plotting to Break Up the Catholic Church?
James Heffernan
Ever since Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina became Pope Francis in March of 2013, conservative Catholics have been sounding alarms about his designs on the Roman Catholic church.
Even though he is truly charismatic, even though he is genuinely humble, even though he has dramatically revived Christ's original commitment to serve the poor and the marginalized, even though he has vowed to reform a church mired in sex scandals, financial corruption, and self-indulgent ostentation, conservative Catholics are afraid that his reforms will go too far.
One such conservative is Ross Douthat, op-ed columnist of the New York Times, who has just accused the pope of plotting a change that could lead to a schism -- a breakup of the Roman Catholic church.
On October 17, in an article titled "The Plot to Change Catholicism," Douthat claimed that Francis "favors the proposal, put forward by the church's liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null." A week later, in an article titled "The Pope and the Precipice," Douthat claimed that Francis had tried to railroad this change right through the synod on the family--a worldwide meeting of Catholic bishops on family life that was recently concluded in Rome. "The prelates in charge of the proceedings," he wrote, "--men handpicked by the pontiff -- formally proposed such a rethinking, issuing a document that suggested both a general shift in the church's attitude toward nonmarital relationships and a specific change, admitting the divorced-and-remarried to communion, that conflicts sharply with the church's historic teaching on marriage's indissolubility." And even though many votes "were cast, in effect, against the pope," his proposal -- if adopted -- would overturn a bedrock principle of the Roman Catholic church: "the principle that when a first marriage is valid a second is adulterous, a position rooted in the specific words of Jesus of Nazareth. To change on that issue, no matter how it was couched, would not be development; it would be contradiction and reversal." It would "put the church on the brink of a precipice" leading to "a real schism."
On October 26, the day after this second article appeared, the New York Timespublished a letter signed by six Jesuit priests and 49 other professors of religion and/or theology at various institutions, many of them Catholic (such as Georgetown, Loyola, and Fordham). Besides having "no professional qualifications for writing" about Catholic church doctrine, the professors stated, Douthat has not only written a "politically partisan" account of the synod but also has "sometimes subtly, sometimes openly" accused the pope of heresy.
In his reply to the professors, which has just appeared, Douthat makes two points: a columnist has the right to be provocative, and even a non-theologian has the right to argue that changing a fundamental teaching of the church "sounds like heresy by any reasonable definition of the term."
These two points strike me as an eminently reasonable response to an ill-considered reprimand. However distinguished they may be, the 55 professors who signed the letter did themselves no favor by telling an astute, articulate Catholic intellectual to shut up. On the contrary, his thoughtful, principled critique of the pope's agenda deserves a far more substantive response, which is what I venture to offer here.
First of all, the reason why the prospect of a change in doctrine alarms Catholic conservatives is that they see the church as a bulwark of enduring, unwavering principle holding out against the tides of compromise, acquiescence, and relativity that swirl around us in the secular world. For conservatives like Douthat, steadfast preservation of doctrine is probably the single most important thing that distinguishes the Roman Catholic church from all other denominations. And for him, its fidelity to doctrine is exemplified by its insistence that the marriage bond is indissoluble, for as Douthat reminds us, this teaching derives from the very words of Christ in the New Testament: "what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Matthew 19:6, also Mark 10:9).
Actually, however, Christ's ban on divorce is not absolute. He goes on to allow that a man may divorce his wife for what has been variously translated as unfaithfulness, adultery, or fornication. Matthew's Greek word for the exception-- porneia -is translated as "fornicationem" in the Latin of St. Jerome's fourth-century Vulgate (a translation of the Bible officially accepted by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century) and as "fornication" in the first English version of the Bible translated under Roman Catholic authority in the sixteenth century and known as Douay-Rheims. I stress this little linguistic point because in the English version of the Bible now approved by the U.S. Conference of Bishops, Matthew's word porneia is said to mean "unlawful" by reason of incest (as explained in the Bishps' commentary). If you wonder why and how Jerome's "fornicationem" and Douay-Rheims's "fornication" turned into "unlawful-by-reason-of-incest," just consider how awkward it would be for a church that defines marriage as "indissoluble" to have to make an exception for wifely infidelity. Even though there is every reason to believe that Christ himself sanctioned such an exception, changing infidelity to incest neatly cuts the number of likely exceptions to just about zero, thus clearing the ground for the church to make its own rules for exception--as explained below.
So the church's teaching on the marriage bond first of all entails a questionable version of what Christ actually said on the topic. Secondly, and more importantly, the mighty bulwark of Catholic doctrine on the indissolubility of marriage has for centuries (since the early Middle Ages) had a conspicuous hole known as annulment. While steadfastly insisting that marriage is indissoluble, the Catholic church reserves the right to annul specific marriages, to declare (for whatever reasons it finds acceptable) that they never took place -- even though they may have lasted for many years and produced children. (In 1996, after fathering twin sons in a marriage lasting 12 years, Joe Kennedy -- son of Robert and nephew of JFK -- won approval of his request for annulment from the Archdiocese of Boston and failed to get final approval from the Vatican only because his aggrieved wife appealed the Boston ruling.) The hole thus opened in the bulwark of marriage is no mere pinprick. In the past forty years, the Vatican has granted well over one million annulments in the U.S. alone, ranging from 63,933 in 1991 down to 35,009 in 2007. (J.J. Ziegler, "Annulment Nation," Catholic World Report, April 28, 2011).
In other words, the would-be bedrock principle of the indissolubility of marriage survives only in a nominal sense: the church never grants divorce, only annulments, but the practical effect is exactly the same. The chief difference between the two is that an annulment is harder to get. If Francis really aims to let divorced and remarried Catholics take communion without getting their first marriages annulled, as Douthat claims, that would indeed be a major change. But as shown by the rise and fall of annulments in the past forty years, the Church can make them easier or harder to get with absolutely no change in doctrine, and I suspect that as a result of the latest synod, they will become easier to get. Would that push the Catholic church over a precipice or precipitate a schism? Perhaps Mr. Douthat can tell us.
But the real problem with making the identity of the Roman Catholic church hang on its opposition to divorce is that doing so helps make the church look like the Republican party at its most obstructive: the party of no. In his recent visit to the U.S., Pope Francis movingly re-affirmed what the church stands for -- for the inspiration of the gospel, for the power of dialogue, for the dignity of the human being, for peace and justice, for the needs of refugees and immigrants, for the poor and the marginalized (including prisoners), and for the ecological salvation of our fragile planet. Conservative Catholics revere the church for what it stands against, and they fear most of all that it may stop saying no: no to divorce; no to contraceptives, no to abortion, no to gay marriage, no to the ordination of women, no to marriage for priests.
To take just one of these items, the ban on contraceptives points to one of the biggest of all gaps between teaching and practice among Catholics. Even though Catholic institutions have lately been fighting (under the banner of "religious freedom") to deny their employees the right to contraceptives provided by the Affordable Care Act, the overwhelming majority of married Catholic women (something like 96%) have been using contraceptives ever since Pope Paul VI--way back in 1969 -- over-rruled a special Commission of clergy and laity that overwhelmingly recommended ending the ban on them. There is also a notable exception to the ban on marriage for priests: married Episcopal priests who wish to become Catholic priests can do so while keeping their wives.
Beyond those complications, most of the church's prohibitions illustrate the gap between doctrine and practical effect. Banning contraceptives, for example, raises the frequency of unintended pregnancies, which in turn leads to more abortions. Denying communion to divorced and remarried Catholics means alienating not only them but any children of their second marriage, who must be regarded as officially illegitimate.
But the whole controversy over the church's doctrine on divorce ignores the biggest of all elephants in the room of Catholicism. Whatever the church may decide on divorce or contraception, the real threat to its vitality in the U.S. lies in its refusal to ordain women even as its priestly population steadily declines. Since 1981, the total number of Catholic priests in America has dropped from 52, 227 to 38, 275 (as of 2012), leaving just one priest for every 2000 Catholics and no priest at all for over 3000 parishes. Whether or not the church ever decides to let divorced and remarried Catholics take communion, the far more pressing question is whether or not it will ever let women become priests. Without such a move, which Catholic authorities have never convincingly shown to be contrary to anything but long habit, the Catholic church in America may well be heading for a precipice: the precipice of slow extinction.
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