Cardinal Raymond Burke has expressed hope that the forthcoming Synod on the Family will confirm once and for all the Church’s teaching that divorced and remarried people are excluded from Communion.
"The matter really has to be clarified at this point so that this [debate] doesn't continue," Cardinal Burke, prefect of the Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature, told the US-based Catholic News Service, ahead of the forthcoming Synod. "For this to go on for another year, it can only do harm [...] What I would hope would happen is that this issue be clarified and it be off the table."
People who divorced and remarried were committing adultery, he added, and could not be admitted to the Sacraments until their situation was rectified.
He rejected media speculation that there would be a change in church teaching.
"I hear from bishops and priests that many people are coming to them and insisting that they can now receive the Sacraments because they interpret that somehow the Church has already changed her teaching. And that isn't healthy," he said.
However today the synod's organiser, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, said he could not second guess what the synod would decide.
Earlier this week Cardinal Burke hit out at claims that German Cardinal Walter Kasper “spoke for” Pope Francis when he backed Communion for divorced and remarried people.
In a conference call with journalists on Tuesday he said he found it “amazing” that Cardinal Kasper claimed to speak for the Pope.
“The Pope doesn’t have laryngitis. The Pope is not mute. He can speak for himself. If this is what he wants, he will say so,” Cardinal Burke said.
“But for me as a cardinal to say that what I am saying are the words of Pope Francis? That to me is outrageous.”
Cardinal Burke added that whatever Francis thinks about a more lenient approach on Communion for remarried Catholics, he cannot change current church teaching – a view endorsed in the build-up to the Synod by Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller and Cardinal George Pell, as well as a number of other cardinals.
Kasper told The Tablet last month that it was his “impression” that the Pope would like to see an “opening” in the area of allowing Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.
Meanwhile, speaking to the US Catholic publication America and Argentina’s leading daily La Nación on Friday Cardinal Kasper said he thought his opponents feared “a domino effect – if you change one point all would collapse. That’s their fear. This is all linked to an ideological understanding of the Gospel, that it is like a penal code.”
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