The following are excerpts from the above-titled article by Bishop Schneider. The article first appeared on the website Rorate Caeli
The XIV General Assembly of the Synod of the Bishops (October 4 – 25, 2015), which was dedicated to the theme of “The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and Contemporary World,” issued a Final Report with some pastoral proposals submitted to the discernment of the Pope…
The author of this article, Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazahkstan
Yet, during the Synod, there appeared those real new disciples of Moses and the new Pharisees, who in the paragraph numbers 84-86 of the Final Report opened a back door or left looming time bombs for the admittance of the divorced and remarried to Holy Communion. At the same time those bishops who intrepidly defended “the Church’s own fidelity to Christ and to His truth” (Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, 84) were in some media reports unjustly labeled as Pharisees.
The new disciples of Moses and the new Pharisees masked their practical denial of the indissolubility of marriage and of a suspension of the Sixth Commandment on a case-by-case basis under the guise of the concept of mercy, using expressions such as: “way of discernment,” “accompaniment,” “orientations of the bishop,” “dialogue with the priest,” “forum internum,” “a fuller integration into the life of the Church,” a possible suppression of imputability regarding the cohabitation in irregular unions (cf. Final Report, nn. 84-86).
Even when speaking of a “way of discernment” there is talk of “repentance” (Final Report, n. 85)… In fact…such a repentance concerns the past sins against the spouse of the first valid marriage and the repentance of the divorced indeed may not refer to the acts of their marital cohabitation with the new civilly married partner…
Indeed, Cardinal Kasper and like-minded clerics emphatically and repeatedly assured… that a judgment of the conscience in that case has to be considered as being correct even when the divorced and remarried continue to cohabitate in a marital manner, and that they should not be required to live in complete continence as brother and sister…
In quoting the famous number 84 of the Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio of Pope John Paul II in number 85 of the Final Report, the redactors censured the text, cutting out the following decisive formulation: “The way to the Eucharist can only be granted to those who take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.”
In fact, the above intentional censorship of the teaching of Familaris Consortio in n. 85 of the Final Report, represents for any sane hermeneutics the very interpretation key for the understanding of the text section on the divorced and remarried (numbers 84-86)…
When Catholics by means of divorce and adultery theoretically as well as practically repudiate the will of God expressed in the Sixth Commandment, they put themselves in a spiritually serious danger of losing their eternal salvation…
The most merciful act on behalf of the Shepherds of the Church would be to draw the attention to this danger by means of a clear —and at the same time loving — admonition about the necessarily full acceptance of the Sixth Commandment of God…
The text of the Final Report of the Synod not only omits to convince unambiguously divorced and civilly remarried persons concerning the adulterous and thus gravely sinful character of their life style. It indirectly justifies such a lifestyle by means of assigning this question ultimately to the area of the individual conscience and by means of an improper applying of the moral principle of imputability to the case of cohabitation of the divorced and remarried…
The diminution of the subjective responsibility is given only in the case when the partners have the firm intention to live in complete continence and make sincere efforts therein. As long as the partners intentionally persist to continue a sinful life, there can be no suspension of imputability…
One can affirm that the Synod in a certain sense turned out to be in the eyes of public opinion a Synod of adultery, not the Synod of the family. Indeed, all the beautiful affirmations of the Final Report on the marriage and family are eclipsed by the ambiguous affirmations in the text section on the divorced and remarried, a topic which was already confirmed and decided by the Magisterium of the last Roman Pontiffs in faithful conformity with the bi-millennial teaching and practice of the Church…
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