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An interview with Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, Archbishop of Paris, one of the three presidents of the Synod on the Family.
La Croix: The synod was preceded by a questionnaire sent to the parishes. Were you surprised by the influx of replies from local churches?
Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois: Yes, I was. There was very little time between the moment the questionnaire was sent out and the moment we had to provide the replies that would be summarized by country.
The enormous number of replies and their spontaneity showed that people have real expectations of the Church.
La Croix: How do you explain that? Reading them, there seems to be a divide between what the Church says about the family and what Catholics are living.
Cardinal A. V.-T.: The first divide is within society itself, and it may fuel expectations with regard to the Church: it is the gap between what people aspire to and what they actually succeed in doing.
All these opinion polls testify to massive support for the model of a unified, harmonious and stable family. And yet, very often, it doesn’t work out that way. This gap contributes to a sort of structural doubt in relation to marriage.
This divide leads some to look for solutions, and among them, the Christian proposal.
Young people want to marry in the Church because they think their union will be more solid.
This view may seem a bit magical but it is also a way of trusting to the resources of wisdom and tradition. They expect a sort of guarantee from the Church as to the seriousness of their commitment.
La Croix: Doesn’t the Church reply with a normative discourse, particularly to couples whose marriages fail?
Cardinal A. V.-T: It proposes a model of commitment and at the same time what is required to live it. It is inconsistent to want to benefit a priori from a religious guarantee of a commitment without implementing the specific means to live in keeping with that tradition.
But there is indeed a different expectation.
When people experience a failure of their life together, they suffer from it and perhaps even feel guilty about it.
Many people expect the Church to listen to their secret pain, which they can seldom express publicly because society generally intends to erase failure and suffering.
Some people also expect the Church, which they consider a moral authority, to legitimize their new situation, in the case of ‘recomposed’ families or divorced people who remarry.
That is understandable but it is asking the Church for something it cannot do. It cannot say the situation they are in is good.
The central question for the Church is first of all pastoral. It involves knowing how to receive these couples.
Of course it is painful not to be able to go to Communion during mass. The people concerned feel they are being judged by others and excluded. But is that the most pressing problem?
The experience of meeting with divorced people who have remarried shows that the most important thing is to be able to talk, to be listened to and supported in the face of life’s challenges.
La Croix: So what can we expect from the synod?
Cardinal A. V.-T.: The objective set by the pope is to announce good news: to show how the experience of the sacrament of marriage is a source of hope for those who live it and even for all the others.
Marriage can be difficult, it is fragile, but it says something about God, society and the future.
We have to find an intelligible way to express our trust in conjugal love, in parental love, in the commitment between spouses, because we think it is good for humanity.
The second fruit that we can expect is to arrive at a pastoral message that does not merely tell couples they must conform to a model but calls on them to improve.
When we find ourselves faced with people whose situation does not conform to what it should be, we must help them, not first to return to a life in conformity with a norm, but to explore their path to sanctification in the situation in which they find themselves.
It may take years.
It means giving real impetus to the merciful intentions expressed by the pope, not by formally approving every situation or ignoring the constraints but by taking care of people in the situation in which they find themselves.
La Croix: The Church calls the situation of divorced people who remarry “irregular”. Is there any possibility that some day it might become regular? Continue reading
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