The problem of marriage in modern society has been a central theme on the agenda of Pope Francis throughout his pontificate. He has addressed the issue with an approach characterized by mercy and reform, and in the process tensions within the Church have increased.
By celebrating the vocation to marriage and encourage people to marry At a time when many choose not to do so, the Pope has also sought to address the reality of modern relations, including the fact that many marriages today end in divorce and that many Catholics live in situations contrary to the teachings of his church.
Receive the main news of ACI Press by WhatsApp and Telegram
It is increasingly difficult to see Catholic news on social networks. Subscribe to our free channels today:
Last November, the Pope He urged To the pastoral agents to host “who live together, postponing their marriage commitment indefinitely”, as well as “divorced people and revarted.”
The statement occurred ten years after the Pope carried out a gesture that exemplified that inclusiveness: he married a group of couples who, in some cases, had lived together and had children together. Some interpreted the ceremony as an omen of changes in the teaching of the Church about divorce and the new nuptials or said that it showed that the Pope was subtracting importance from tradition. Others insisted that he was simply showing the mercy of a pastor.
Just a few months after his choice in 2013, the Pope announced that he would convene not one, but two synods about the family in the next two years. These bishop assemblies addressed various controversial issues, including church teaching on homosexuality, but their most prominent debate was about whether Catholics with irregular relationships – in particular those who had divorced and married again according to civil law without nullity of the first marriage – they had to receive communion.
The previous potatoes had prohibited this measure unless the man and the woman in the new union refrained from the conjugal relations and lived together “as a brother and sister.”
Pope Francis reopened the issue, but at the end of the synodal process, most bishops were not yet convinced to support liberalization. The Pope responded in his closing speech denouncing “the closed hearts that are often hid wounds ”.
The following year, in its apostolic exhortation Love happinessPope Francis wrote that even people in “objective situation of sin” could be eligible to receive the “help of the sacraments.” Later authorized a interpretation of that language that made it possible for some people in irregular unions to receive communion after a discernment process with a priest.
An important argument of those who opposed this change was that it would undermine the teaching of the Church that the marriage bond is indissoluble or for life. But how many cases does this link really apply? Pope Francis has said that “a large majority of our sacramental marriages are null” because people do not understand the commitment they are assuming.
To face this problem, among others, the Pope approved A proposal of “marriage catechumenate” of one year of preparation to the sacrament, followed by a pastoral accompaniment during the first two or three years of marriage.
Pope Francis has also facilitated the bishops the granting of nullities, in less than two months in some cases, abbreviating a process that could otherwise take years.
Critics of the simplified process have warned that it lacks the necessary quality control, which increases the risk of declaring valid marriages. Some bishops have taken to accept this option. The Pope has complained several times about that resistance, attributing much of it to a financial interest on the canonical lawyers who deal with marriage cases and do not want to lose customers.
The Pope’s reforms in marriage are strict, independent of their conciliatory approach in LGBT issues, including their support for civil unions for same -sex couples. “There is no basis to assimilate or establish analogies, not even remote, between the homosexual unions and God’s design about marriage and family,” he wrote in Love happiness.
A declaration of 2021 of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Vatican, published with the assent of Pope Francis, ruled out the blessings of same -sex couples in part because that type of blessing “would be in a way an imitation or an analogy with the blessing with the blessing Bridal, invoked on the man and woman who joins in the sacrament of marriage. ”
But in December 2023, the doctrinal office declared, with the approval of Pope Francis, that priests could after all blessing the same -sex couples.
The statement Confidence in supplicating He warned that such blessings should not be made “with the clothes, gestures or words of a marriage”, and the Dicastery continued with a press release emphasizing that the blessings must be spontaneous, brief and simple, “not liturgical or ritualized.”
However, some progressives have interpreted permission to receive blessings as a sign that they can expect something else.
“It is a step in the right direction that had long since given,” said Gregor Podschun, leader of the German Catholic Youth Federation, on the occasion of the publication of Confidence in supplicating. “However, this can only be a first step … it is not just blessings, but about marriage for all couples.”
Podschun was an outstanding participant on the German Synodal road, an assembly of bishops and Catholics who in March 2023 voted to approve a formal liturgy for the blessing of same -sex couples.
Almost two years later, a spokeswoman for the Central Committee of German Catholics said that in the coming weeks a collection of suggested sentences for such blessings will be completed and that it will be published shortly after.
Regardless of whether or not the Vatican responds to that publication, the issues related to marriage and the family raised by Pope Francis will continue to challenge the Church’s efforts to apply their teachings to the complexities of modern life.
Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in the National Catholic Register.
Francis X. Rocca Francis X. Rocca
Francis X. Rocca is a senior analyst of the Vatican for Ewtn News. He has covered the Vatican since 2007, more recently for The Wall Street Journal, where he also reported on global religion. He has written for Time, The Times Literary Supplement and The Atlantic, among other publications. Rocca is the director of the documentary “Voices of the Vatican II: The participants remember the council.”