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.
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.
