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One outcome from October’s family synod could be that local bishops make decisions case-by-case on Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.
That’s what Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle of Accra, Ghana, supports, according to an interview published on the Crux website.
The archbishop said he believes this is a result Pope Francis wants from the synod also.
Archbishop Palmer-Buckle is one of four executive officers for the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar.
The assembly met Pope Francis in Rome on February 7.
Archbishop Palmer-Buckle favours the proposal of Cardinal Walter Kasper to allow Catholics who divorce and remarry outside the Church to return to Communion under certain circumstances.
“When a person comes to me, I think I should be able to sit with him or her, or with the family, to find out what the situation is and to give solutions to individual cases without making a sweeping statement,” Archbishop Palmer-Buckle said.
“It’s not a matter of issuing a new law,” he said.
“As for the doctrine [on marriage], I don’t think the Church will change. It’s a question of how we help individuals.”
Pastors in Africa, he said, actually face a wide variety of marital situations, and some flexibility in dealing them would be helpful.
He said the landscape includes not just conventional divorce, but also levirate marriage, under which a widow is required to marry her dead husband’s brother, and polygamy.
“I’ll tell you, the Church in Africa is not just saying ‘divorce, no’,” the archbishop told John Allen of Crux.
“If we look at our own pastoral challenges, there must be room to listen and to see how we can pastorally accompany whoever wants to belong more and more to Christ.”
He gave an example of a woman who has been married to a man for 35 years and had raised children with him, despite him having two other wives.
Under Church law the archbishop would have to tell her to leave the marriage, the archbishop said.
But then her children would say the Church destroyed their family, he added.
Sources
- Crux
- Image: My Joy Online
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News category: World.
