I’ve referred a couple of times to Cardinal Walter Kasper’s very interesting interview with Commonweal Magazine, in which the prelate/theologian discussed the proposals on communion for remarried Catholics that (apparently with a papal blessing) he’s been promoting in advance of the looming Synod of Bishops, which is dedicated to family life and scheduled for this fall. This is going to be the first of two posts on his argument; the second — which won’t be forthcoming till next week at the earliest, I expect — will deal with the communion-for-the-remarried proposal itself, but first I want to address the frame he puts around his ideas, and particular his claim that a truly remarkable number of contemporary marriages may actually be, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, invalid.
Here is a passage from the interview, with the interviewer’s question first, then part of Kasper’s answer:
CWL: In your address to the consistory, you ask whether we can, “in the present situation, presuppose without further ado that the engaged couple shares the belief in the mystery that is signified by the sacrament and that they really understand and affirm the canonical conditions for the validity of the marriage.” You ask whether the presumption of validity from which canon law proceeds is often “a legal fiction.” But can the church afford not to make this presumption? How could the church continue to marry couples in good faith if it assumed that many of them were not really capable of entering into sacramental marriage because they were, as you put it somewhere else in your speech, “baptized pagans”?
Kasper: That’s a real problem. I’ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid. Marriage is a sacrament. A sacrament presupposes faith. And if the couple only want a bourgeois ceremony in a church because it’s more beautiful, more romantic, than a civil ceremony, you have to ask whether there was faith, and whether they really accepted all the conditions of a valid sacramental marriage—that is, unity, exclusivity, and also indissolubility. The couples, when they get married, they want it because it’s stable. But many think, “Well, if we fail, we have the right.” And then already the principle is denied. Many canon lawyers tell me that today in our pluralistic situation we cannot presuppose that couples really assent to what the church requires.
Pope Francis himself has, in fact, made a public reference to the “50 percent of marriages are not valid” possibility, attributing it to his predecessor as archbishop of Buenos Aires. (“For him, half of all marriages are null … because they are married without maturity, they get married without realizing that it’s for an entire lifetime, or they are married because socially they must get married.”) But for the purposes of this post I’m just going to treat this as Kasper’s idea, rather than something the pontiff has explicitly endorsed.
And as ideas go, it’s a rather extraordinary one, given traditional Catholic premises about marriage. Consider, first, that while Catholic teaching regards sacramental marriage as the most elevated and potentially grace-filled form of marital union, the church has also extended the presumption of validity to non-Catholic and indeed non-Christian marriages, on the grounds that wedlock is a natural institution as well as a supernatural one, and that human couples do not need the specific benefits of the sacrament, or the specific beliefs of Catholic faith, in order to enter into a valid union. There are wrinkles here: For instance, in the event that an individual married in civil court (or as a Muslim, Hindu, Jew, etc …) subsequently divorces, converts to Catholicism and wants to marry again, their first marriage can be dissolved, as sacramental marriages cannot, under very specific circumstances. But the presumption is still that most marriage vows made outside the church, so long as they take the proper form — in the sense of involving a lifelong promise of fidelity, and an openness to children — are as legitimate in God’s eyes, and as morally binding in the church’s, as a sacramental marriage is for Catholics.
Then consider that where Catholic marriage specifically is concerned, the church teaches the graces available from the sacrament are not a one-off infusion that’s only available during the wedding ceremony itself. This means that the immature Catholic couple that doesn’t grasp the full import of their vows, and thus might be prime candidates for an annulment if they parted ways three months later, can still grow into a valid, supernaturally-graced Catholic marriage over years of fidelity, childrearing, and mutual love. And it suggests that even if a larger-than-usual number of Catholic marriages are not immediately valid, because of bad catechesis, “baptized paganism,” immaturity or what-have-you, you can’t just assume that if they stay married, their invalidity necessarily perdures across the years and decades.
Then consider, finally, that neither the Catholic Church nor Christianity writ large has traditionally portrayed marriage as a form of truly heroic virtue, a state of life that only a few saints can fully live up to and live out. Instead, marriage is supposed to be the easier path — as much “a remedy against sin,” in the language of the Book of Common Prayer, as a counsel of perfection — with celibacy potentially the higher and holier one. “Easier” does not mean “easy,” obviously, but still the basic idea is that marriage is an institution suited to our fallen nature, rather than a beatitude-level call to transcend fallenness entirely. And part of that suitedness lies in the fact that its demands and prescriptions are relatively easy to understand, naturally appealing to most couples in the initial bloom of love, and near-universally grasped by people of disparate beliefs: One does not need a doctorate in theology to “get” what the church asks of married couples, and what they’re supposed to ask of one another, and so even an intellectually-immature or badly-catechized Catholic should have some idea of what he’s vowing himself into.
So it would be remarkable enough, given all of these points, if Kasper had merely asserted that half of non-Catholic marriages were invalid — remarkable and, I would say, quite anti-ecumenical, and fairly insulting to non-Christian married couples, to say nothing of Anglicans and Lutherans and Baptists and Pentecostals. But to say what he said about sacramental Catholic marriages is more remarkable still: It amounts to a claim that our current social situation is so unusual, so extraordinary and revolutionary, that basic assumptions about humanity’s natural ability to marry no longer obtain, and that supernatural graces taken for granted in Catholic ritual and teaching are no longer nearly as efficacious as the church has traditionally assumed.
Now just because a claim is extraordinary doesn’t mean that it’s false. Clearly the church already assumes that the spirit of the age has had some effect on people’s capacity to marry validly, which is why it grants more annulments, on more varied grounds, than it would have in the recent past. Kasper is just extending a logic, to some extent, that the church’s marriage tribunals already accept …
… but he’s extending it a long, long way, without any obvious real-world justification. To see what I mean, let’s look at some statistics from the United States. Here, from the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate, are recent numbers on divorce rates by religious affiliation. Among ever-married U.S. adults, 36 percent have gone through a divorce. Among ever-married Catholics, however, the figure is only 28 percent — which suggests, at the very least, that the church’s teaching on indissolubility (or the grace of the sacrament) still has some influence.
Given these numbers, for Kasper’s “50 percent” guesstimate to be anywhere near accurate one would first have to assume that every single Catholic marriage that ended in divorce was canonically invalid from the get-go. And then one would have to further assume that that around one-third of intact (or ended-by-death) Catholic marriages are invalid as well.
Does that reasonable? Well, don’t answer yet, because actually it’s a little more complicated than that. Note that Kasper is not talking about all marriages entered into by self-identified Catholics; he’s only talking about sacramental marriages, which is a narrower category, since some self-identified Catholics get married outside the church. Here, from a 2007 CARA report, are some numbers that highlight that distinction:
Two-thirds of currently married Catholics were married in the Church. One in 20 were not married in the Church but had their marriage convalidated by the Church. The remaining three in ten married respondents indicate that they neither married in the Church nor had their marriage convalidated.
And crucially, Catholics who marry outside the church are much more likely to divorce:
Catholics who have divorced or who are currently separated are significantly less likely than currently married Catholics to have been married in the Church (45 percent compared to 65 percent).
The 2007 report I just quoted has a slightly higher estimate than the more recent CARA data for the percentage of ever-married Catholics who have experienced a divorce: 32 percent rather than 28 percent. So let’s split the difference and say that 30 percent of married American Catholics have seen their marriages end in divorce. But per CARA’s numbers, only 45 percent of that total were in sacramental marriages to begin with, so (if I’m doing the math right) in the “married-in-church” category Kasper is talking about, the actual divorce-per-sacramental-marriage rate is more like 22 percent. Which in turn makes his claim of 50 percent invalidity yet more remarkable: For it to be true, the rate of sacramentally-married invalidity would be more than double the actual rate of sacramentally-married divorce (let alone the rate of divorce-and-remarriage, which is even lower still).
It’s also worth pointing out — again using the CARA data — that only 15 percent of divorced Catholics have sought an annulment, and half of those sought have been granted. And applications for annulments have actually been falling in the United States over the last decade or so, in tandem with a decline in sacramental marriages among Catholics. The first figure suggests that even if Kasper were correct about the state of marriage, the most logical response would be to educate Catholics about the annulment process rather than assuming that we need some additional dispensation. (I’ll say more about this in my next post.) But the second figure, the decline in applications, suggests again that he is not correct, because it points to a further problem with his estimate: Even if one concedes that secularism and the sexual revolution have led to more invalid marriages, more people entering the institution with the (un-Catholic) belief that they can opt out, there are also countervailing trends, because in a more secular era the choice to marry sacramentally is itself a stronger indicator of religious commitment than it would have been fifty or a hundred years ago. These trends may not cancel out, but the latter should mitigate the former, so that you can’t just assume that the “baptized pagans” problem gets worse the more secular a given society becomes.
Admittedly, I’m only looking at numbers here from the United States, not from Kasper’s Germany or Pope Francis’s Argentina. But the crude divorce rate in Europe is much lower than in the United States, and the same is true across much of Latin America. On both continents, marriage itself is less common and thus more self-selective than in the U.S., and (again, not surprisingly, when self-selection increases) couples who do marry are more likely to stay together. Overall, family instability is much more pervasive in Latin America than in the U.S.A., but most of that instability is driven by the prevalence of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births, rather than by divorce and subsequent remarriage. And while do not have the equivalent of CARA’s Catholic-specific statistics for Argentina, if crude divorce rates are lower across Latin America it seems safe to assume that the percentage of sacramental marriages that end in divorce is lower still … in which case Kasper’s estimate would look even more extreme.
Extreme and, I think, dangerous for the church. As Michael Brendan Dougherty notes, the “50 percent invalid” claim offers a kind of common ground for reactionaries who believe that both church and culture have been pervasively corrupted, and progressives who think that traditional Catholic teaching simply can’t be made to fit the lived reality of modern life. But what they’re converging on is a counsel of despair, in which mercy for the divorced depends on telling married Catholics that their marriages are essentially a coin-flip, and that their access to sacramental grace should be persistently in doubt. It’s a version of the “to solve a problem, make it bigger” approach to crisis management, which in my experience almost never works out. And once again, it simply doesn’t jibe with the church’s longstanding view of the basic human (not Catholic, human) capacity to marry. Maybe that view needs to change, but before it does I would want to see stronger evidence than a 22 percent divorce rate for the sacramentally-married over a relatively brief span of cultural time. The burden of proof rests with the pessimists here, and Cardinal Kasper hasn’t yet come close to meeting it.