Divorced Catholics and Communion

Ralph has been married for 22 years. His wife and four teen-age daughters are, like him, devout Catholics. But when the family goes to Mass together each Sunday, only his daughters receive Communion. Why? Ralph had an earlier, unsuccessful marriage, and when he remarried he was automatically excluded from the church's sacramental life. His wife is likewise barred from the sacraments because she is a baptized Catholic who has married a divorced man.

Ralph's case is hypothetical. But his plight is a reality for perhaps 5,000,000 American Catholics, many of whom have resolved the conflict by abandoning their faith. Others simply ignore the church's prohibition, continuing to receive the sacraments without official sanction. But there are also Catholics like Ralph who feel morally bound by the stern strictures of canon law and who would rather have a second-class citizenship in the church than none at all. To live this way, as one sympathetic diocesan official puts it, "you practically have to be a religious nut."

Deus Dux. One way out of the dilemma would be for Ralph and his wife to separate or seek the church's permission to live together platonically. (Since the church does not recognize his remarriage, conjugal relations between them are considered adulterous.) Another way would be for Ralph to try to get his first marriage annulled by church tribunals--a process that despite recent reforms may take years and entail a considerable outlay of money.

Since Vatican II, a number of U.S. dioceses have adopted formal procedures to readmit estranged Catholics to Communion without judging the validity of their existing marriage. One of the first to do so was Portland, Ore., where archdiocesan chancellor, Father Bertram Griffin, set up a so-called "good conscience" plan seven years ago. Says Griffin: "We were trying to bring canon law and pastoral practice together."

The Portland plan specified three criteria for readmission, which are similar to those used in other dioceses: the petitioning Catholic must deem his existing marriage stable and binding; the risk of scandal arising from the return of the petitioner to Communion must be minimal; finally, the petitioner must in "good conscience" believe that his former marriage was invalid. His reasons for this must be of the kind that are unprovable in church tribunals. Such cases would include those where the former spouse is accused of fraudulent intent and is unwilling to talk, or where he was homosexual or impotent and declined to undergo the required psychiatric or medical examinations.

The most recent diocese to adopt good-conscience procedures, Baton Rouge, La., has also become the scene of the innovation's undoing. In June, Bishop Robert Tracy announced that he was setting up a good-conscience committee to regularize the process of bringing certain remarried Catholics back to the sacraments. "The church has a pastoral responsibility of healing and forgiveness," the bishop said. "I trust this announcement will be met by all the people of our diocese with joy."

The bishop miscalculated. A group of conservative laymen called Deus Dux ("God is our leader") sent a letter of complaint to Rome and held a "pray-in" in front of Bishop Tracy's apartment. Even worse for the good-conscience cause, Tracy's announcement touched off an ecclesiastical storm in the hierarchy.

Jesuit Daniel Lyons, a conservative columnist for the National Catholic Register, termed the good-conscience practice "a scandal" and questioned how any divorced Catholic who attempted remarriage could be considered to be in good conscience. Lyons' view is known to be shared privately by many U.S. prelates, including the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia. In August, Cardinal Krol consigned the good-conscience cause to limbo. Citing a Vatican directive, the cardinal forbade all practices "contrary to current discipline," pending the results of a study on the problems of remarried Catholics that is currently under way in Rome. Most of the dioceses known to have set up good-conscience procedures have now suspended them.* It is unlikely though that the many hundreds of Catholics who have already been reinstated will now be turned away from Communion.

The good-conscience cause is only the tip of a theological iceberg. Several liberal Catholic thinkers have been reassessing the church's literal interpretation of the New Testament teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. They argue that indissolubility is an ideal rather than an absolute, and that a marriage from which the emotional and psychological life has faded is no less sundered than a union ended by the death of one of the partners. In his new book Power to Dissolve (Belknap Press, Harvard; $15), Lawyer-Philosopher John T. Noonan Jr. indicates that the church's conception of what makes a marriage null has been fluid rather than fixed throughout the eight-century evolution of canon law. Writes Noonan: "Neither the theoretical construct of marriage nor the express texts of Scripture, neither the absence of precedent nor the desire for uniformity, has barred innovation in the past." Noonan speaks for many Catholics when he says that the evolution should, and will, continue.

*Besides Portland and Baton Rouge, they include Boise, Idaho; Baker, Ore.; Seattle, Wash.; Birmingham; Pueblo, Colo., and Helena, Mont.

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