German bishops’ president preaches on divorce, remarriage

Mar 21, 2014

BERLIN: The German bishops have elected Cardinal Reinhard Marx to a six-year term as president of the nation’s episcopal conference, one of the most influential in the Church. Cardinal Marx succeeds Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the retired archbishop of Freiburg im Breisgau.

In 2013, Pope Francis named Cardinal Marx to the eight-member Council of Cardinals, an advisory body that assists
the Pope in the reform of the Roman Curia and the governance of the universal Church. Pope Francis named Cardinal Marx the coordinator of the newly-formed Council for the Economy, a 15-member body entrusted with the task of supervising the economic management, structures, and administrative and financial activities of the Roman Curia, the institutions connected
to the Holy See, and Vatican City State.

In a March 13 homily to the German bishops, Cardinal Marx said that the Gospel account of the woman caught in adultery (Jn. 7:53-8:1) should be applied to discussions of divorce and remarriage.

After reviewing the textual history of the passage and recalling that some rigorists in the early Church did not think that the sin of adultery could be absolved, Cardinal Marx said that Jesus showed the scribes and Pharisees, who wanted the woman to be stoned, that they, too, were sinners. “One thinks of the rigorists of all time in the Church ... All are sinners like the woman, all have need of forgiveness.”

The prelate added that Jesus’ forgiveness of the woman, his restoration of her dignity before God, and loyalty to his example of mercy to sinners are important in the Church’s discussion of divorce and remarriage, especially as applied to confession, which is intended to offer sinners forgiveness and to save people from “the sentence of God” and “also from social death.”

Jesus’ forgiveness of the woman, however, is not a call to laxism — a reference to Christ’s words, “Go, and sin no more” — but a “call to a new life,” Cardinal Marx continued.

The passage is crucial in understanding guilt and forgiveness, he concluded.

“If we pastorally, spiritually, and theologically practice this more, then more doors could open than we think at the moment. Amen.” --CWN