German-speakers urge step-by-step approach on marriage

In their second interim report at the Synod on the Family, the German-speaking group of bishops emphasised the importance of “gradually” leading people to the sacrament of marriage.

The bishops wrote of the “great pastoral challenge” but also the “great joy” of leading people from “non-binding relationships, to cohabiting partners, to couples who have only married in a register office and finally to those in a valid, sacramental church marriage”.

The Church’s pastoral approach towards marriage today must allow people time to “mature” along the path towards sacramental marriage and must not act on the principle of “all or nothing”, the bishops said.

They rejected the “deductive” practice of subsuming “concrete situations under a general principle”, pointing out that, according to Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent, “fundamental principles must be applied to the particular and often complex situation with prudence and wisdom”.

They said the foundation for a “step-by-step process” in the Church’s approach to marriage had been laid by St John Paul II in the apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio, which said the Church’s pastoral concern “will show itself to be even more lively for families in general and for those families in particular which are in difficult or irregular situations”.

Among those in the group are: German Cardinals Walter Kasper (pictured top), who has proposed a “penitential path” for divorced and remarried persons to receive Communion; and Gerhard Muller, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who is known to oppose that path. Co-leading the group are Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn and German Archbishop Heiner Koch.