Controversy over revision to Benedict’s Collected Works

A revision of an essay in the fourth volume of the Collected Works of Pope Emeritus Benedict, recently released in German, has ignited a controversy over the removal of a passage about Communion for remarried divorcees, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

The volume contains Joseph Ratzinger’s 1972 essay “Zur Frage nach der Unauflöslichkeit der Ehe” (“With Regard to the Question of the Indissolubility of Marriage”). In the 1972 version of this essay, Ratzinger wrote that remarried divorcees should in certain cases be allowed to receive the sacraments. In the revised 2014 version of the same essay, this passage is removed but there is no mention that anything has been changed.

The issue in question generated controversy at the Synod on the Family in October, and some commentators have tried to link the essay’s changes to the synod.

But Fr Wolfgang Beinert, Joseph Ratzinger’s assistant when he taught dogmatics at Regensburg University in the 1970s, said he thought the  changes were made “before [the Pope Emeritus] even knew about the Extraordinary Synod”.