90-second book review: Jesus Wept is a To Do List for Pope Leo XIV

Seeing things with the eyes of Christ inspires the Church's pastoral care for the faithful who are living together, or are only married civilly, or are divorced and remarried. 

Pope Francis

Amoris Laetitia, October 1, 2015

Jesus Wept: Seven Popes And The Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church was released early this year before the death of Pope Francis. Authored by Philip Shenon, an award-winning investigative reporter, the book chronicles the papacies of the seven popes that preceded Pope Leo XIV, from Pius XII to Pope Francis. 

Shenon's book began by focusing on Vatican II and the primary issues facing the Catholic Church when the Council of Cardinals began its deliberations in 1962.  First, should Catholic priests and deacons be permitted to marry? Second, should the Church allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion? Third, should the ban on birth control be lifted?

A commission created by Pope Paul VI during the Vatican II proceedings recommended that the Church permit married couples to avail themselves of artificial birth control, but Pope Paul rejected its recommendations. In 1968, he issued Humanae Vitae, which proclaimed all contraceptives to be contrary to the Catholic faith.

Regarding the question of whether priests should be permitted to marry, the Church has not budged; priests must remain celibate. However, married men can be ordained as deacons, and married Episcopal priests who enter the Catholic Church through the Anglican Rite process can become Catholic priests. 

Nor has the Church retreated from the position that divorced Catholics who remarry are barred from the sacraments. Shenon wrote that Pope Francis made the annulment process easier (p. 504), but he's wrong about that. In many dioceses, divorced Catholics must go through a modern-day Inquisition when seeking an annulment, and the outcome is uncertain. In other dioceses, an annulment is merely a financial transaction; a marriage can be nullified simply by prayerfully writing a check.

Millions of Catholics and lapsed Catholics are looking to Pope Leo to reject the Church's heartless and clueless positions on these three burning issues:

• First, priests should be permitted to marry.

• Second, married Catholics should be able to avail themselves of contraceptives without being branded as sinners.

• Third, divorced Catholics who remarry should be able to receive Communion, as Pope Francis suggested in his Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia — a document that he did not have the courage to operationalize.

Pope Francis is dead. God help the Catholic Church if the cardinals elect a pope who is harsh toward divorced Catholics

 Pope Francis, the man who shocked the world with his sympathetic comment about the gay community and his humility, is dead. A new pope will be elected soon. If you've seen Conclave, you know how that works.

Most Americans are aware of Francis's saintly modesty, but they don't know that Pope Francis tried to reunite the Catholic Church with divorced Catholics. 

In Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Francis's lengthy Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis wrote that divorced and remarried Catholics "need to be fully integrated into Christian communities in the variety of ways possible, while avoiding any occasion of scandal." 

Indeed, Pope Francis emphasized:

Such persons need to feel not as excommunicated members of the Church, but instead as living members, able to live and grow in the Church and experience her as a mother who welcomes them always, who takes care of them with affection and encourages them along the path of life and the Gospel. This integration is also needed in the care and Christian upbringing of their children, who ought to be considered most important.

Pope Francis recognized that divorced Catholics "have entered into a new union" that "should not be pigeonholeed or fit into an overly rigid classification leaving no room for suitable personal and pastoral discernment." Nor should the Church see itself as a "tollhouse," but as "the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems."

Some Catholic priests have embraced Francis's call for compassion and inclusion toward divorced Catholics, allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments. However, others have forced these individuals to undergo a rigorous annulment process that hearkens back to the spirit of the Inquisition. This haughty and judgmental attitude has alienated millions of Catholics and driven them out of the Church.

The cardinals will almost certainly elect a new pope who will be kindred in spirit to Pope Francis and the good Pope John XXIII.  Let us all pray that the next pope has the compassion and courage of these two saintly predecessors and will bestow the mercy of Christ on divorced Catholics and welcome them to partake of the sacraments. 

 

Photo credit: Children of the Inquisition