Pope plays a risky game with his marriage proposals

It’s been 18 months since Pope Francis invited Cardinal Walter Kasper to raise anew the argument that divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive communion. That invitation touched off a civil war within the church’s hierarchy, pitting cardinal against cardinal, theologian against theologian; the conflict has reverberated across books, speeches, and op-ed pages, and it’s dominated the church’s synod on the family, whose second meeting looms this fall.

It’s clear that this was all intentional: that the Pope wanted a big internal argument over marriage and communion, that he deliberately started this civil war.

The question that remains unanswered, though, is how he intends to finish it.

Ever since last fall, Vatican tea-leaf readers have been busy, looking for signs that Cardinal Kasper might be falling out of favour, or alternatively, for evidence that Pope Francis might be stacking the synod’s deck in favour of communion for the remarried.

Now, though, the pope has actually made a major move on marriage. He’s changing canon law governing annulments, making it much easier for divorced Catholics to have their first marriage declared invalid, null and void.

The changes do not merely streamline the existing annulment process, as many expected, by removing a mandatory review of each decision. They promise a fast-track option, to be implemented at the discretion of local bishops, that would allow annulments to be granted in no more than 45 days if both parties consent and certain personal factors are involved. Since that list of factors seems capacious and varied, in effect the Pope is offering bishops the chance to expedite most annulment petitions involving consenting ex-spouses, without fear of rebuke from Rome.

This is a major liberalisation of the church’s rules, probably the most significant of Pope Francis’s pontificate to date. In the United States, home to about half the world’s annulments, the process already errs on the side of the petitioners, but even in the US, the path is lengthy and rigorous; it’s just that the American Catholic Church has the resources and personnel to keep the wheels moving. Whereas the new policy might actually make the process easier than secular divorce, depending on what individual bishops choose to do.

What the new rules do not do, however, is explicitly change the church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, in the way that admitting the remarried to Communion absent an annulment would. This may seem like theological hair-splitting, but from the point of view of Catholic unity it’s crucial. Fast-tracking annulments weakens the credibility of Catholic doctrine, in both implication and effect.

But it does not formally reverse the church’s teaching about the nature of marriage and communion.

Which is why annulment reform has long been seen as a possible compromise between the two sides of this Catholic civil war. What Pope Francis has done is clearly a liberal move, more liberal than I expected. But it’s still not the wider opening on sex and marriage that many progressive Catholics sought, since it doesn’t imply (as Cardinal Kasper’s proposal does) that cohabiting and same-sex couples — and, in African societies, the polygamous — might also be welcomed to Communion. And while it gives conservative Catholics grounds for dismay and critique, it doesn’t directly undercut belief in the Pope’s infallibility or the permanence of doctrine.

But what does it mean that Pope Francis has made this move pre-emptively, before the next half of the synod begins? Perhaps, as the veteran Vaticanista John Allen suggests, he wants to dial down the synod’s temperature, avoid more pitched battles over Cardinal Kasper’s proposal, and create “space for other issues to emerge”. This seems plausible, especially since the new rules address many of the cases that presumably made the Kasper proposal appealing in the first place.

At the same time, advocates of opening communion more directly aren’t obviously giving up the fight — and their ranks still include many of Pope Francis’ friends and allies, in his own Jesuit order and the hierarchy. From the liberal perspective, the new annulment rules may simply move the goal posts farther in their direction, setting up a future settlement that’s even more favourable to their ambitions.

For instance: they might hope the annulment ruling’s emphasis on the local bishop’s authority would be extended to issues of sexuality generally — that Pope Francis, in a post-synod document, would avoid overtly endorsing Communion for people in irregular situations, but use language that makes it clear to bishops that they need fear no repercussions if they go the liberal way. (Indeed, by tolerating a German hierarchy in open revolt on these issues, the pope is effectively doing this already.)

What this liberal-friendly settlement wouldn’t do, however, is actually settle anything for the church. Instead, it would harden the church’s existing divisions, with increasingly divergent Catholicisms in different parishes, dioceses and countries.

Which remains the great danger of Pope Francis’ current course. He may have planned to start a civil war and then cleverly resolve it. But he could end up making that conflict more enduring, a split that widens and a wound that doesn’t heal.

The Pope wanted a big internal argument over marriage and communion.