Well, we are just a week or two from the Exhortation of Desolation. I originally wrote these words over a year ago, but I think I have another article saying the same even earlier than that but I am too lazy to look for it right now.
I have been trying to tell people for the longest time that the real danger was not from the Synod, but from some document that would come after. In one of my many dealings with the subject, I said:
I want you to remember that we hardly ever hear of the divorced and remarried being denied communion. So like gay marriage, the ultimate goal is not the sacrilege itself, but something else. What that will look like is anybody’s guess, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised at the following scenario or others similar to it.
The synod documents might make a basic statement about the indissolubility of marriage with no specific mention of the divorced and remarried receiving communion, knowing that anything other than this is impossible now. But the documents might also contain the now boilerplate calls for pastoral consideration. In conclusion, either the synod itself or perhaps the Pope himself in a following document may make a request for local Bishops’ conferences to explore ways for the divorced and remarried to be better integrated into parish life.
With those vague statements giving plausible deniability to the hierarchy, several Bishops’ conferences starting with Germany will issue norms allowing the divorced and remarried to receive communion after confession or some such other nonsense, which they are already likely allowing.
And the Church will do nothing. And then the practice will spread like wildfire. Think Communion in the hand. With the barn door left open, the horses are gone.
Now, this is what Roberto De Mattei has to say about the same:
What will these “innovative practices” be? The document’s key word is “integration”. Those who are in an irregular situation will be “integrated” into the community: they could become catechists, liturgical animators, godparents for Baptism and Confirmation, best men/bridesmaids at weddings and so on; all activities the traditional praxis of the Church to this day has forbidden them owing to their state of public sin. Yet, Alberto Melloni writes in “La Repubblica”, March 19th “on Communion for the divorced and remarried no novelties are expected. Seeing as the problem is to legitimize a praxis (…), not establish it theologically”. The document does not anticipate a “general rule” of access to the Eucharist, but would allow confessors and individual bishops to permit admission to the Sacraments “case by case”. The novelty, Melloni explains, is based on facts not on words, “by giving responsibility and restoring effective powers to bishops, marking, as Cardinal Kasper said, a real “revolution”.
I hate to say I told you so, but I may have to.
