Benedict sets record straight on divorced and remarried

Pope Emeritus Benedict has denied that he sought to influence the Synod on the Family by excising a passage about Communion for remarried Catholics in a new volume of his collected works, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

In a rare and exclusive interview on 7 December, Benedict dismissed the rumours as “nonsense”.

Some commentators claimed  the revision of his 1972 essay “On the Indissolubility of Marriage” in the newly published fourth volume of his Collected Works, was made to coincide with discussion of the subject in the synod.

In the 1972 version of the essay, Joseph Ratzinger argued that remarried divorcees should in certain cases be allowed to receive the sacraments. In the revised 2014 version of the essay, he is no longer of this opinion but defends easier access to annulments.

Pope Emeritus Benedict told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung there was ­“nothing new” in the revised text and recalled that he had already spoken out “far more drastically” in favour of the Church’s teaching that remarried divorcees could not receive Communion when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Pope John Paul II’s 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio had convinced him that church teaching on the subject should not be changed, he said.