Communion for the Remarried Still a Heated Debate
by Sandro Magister
ROME, June 11, 2014 – Pope Francis doesn't like the discussion in view of the upcoming synod being focused only on communion for the divorced and remarried. He said so to journalists during the flight back to Rome from the Holy Land. His preference is decidedly for a "holistic," global reflection on the family.
But what focused everyone's attention on that controversial point was precisely the presentation with which Cardinal Walter Kasper introduced the consistory last February. A presentation that Francis immediately passed with flying colors, telling the cardinals he had found it theologically "profound," "serene," thought out "on [his] knees," and that the Argentine Jesuit Juan Carlos Scannone, the theology professor of the young Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has praised even more highly in the latest issue of "La Civiltà Cattolica."
The fact is that since that consistory the controversy over communion for the remarried has rocked the Church even at the highest levels.
Cardinal Kasper himself has again spoken out in favor of communion for the remarried, in an extensive interview with "Commonweal."
But there has also been public opposition to Kasper, including from cardinals Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Carlo Caffarra, Velasio De Paolis, and Walter Brandmüller.
The latter of these recently presented a second argument dedicated to this issue, published in Italian on a website of theological reflection:
> Connubio tra potere e diritto
As the Church historian that he is - and as president for more than twenty years of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences - Brandmüller has presented in this essay the clash between Pope Nicholas I and Lothair II, king of Lotharingia, in the ninth century.
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