The Council of Trent did not condemn second marriages in Venice

Oct 10, 2014

By Sandro Magister
La Civilta Cattolica has waited until the eve of the synod to break the silence that it had maintained until now on the most controversial question: whether or not to allow second weddings after a failed marriage.

And in taking the field, it has fully espoused the cause of the innovators, with Cardinal Walter Kasper in the lead, who is cited from the very first lines as a beacon of reference.

La Civilta Cattolica is not just any sort of magazine. Written exclusively by Jesuits, its drafts pass inspection by the Vatican authorities before publication. Pope Francis and the current director of the magazine, Fr Antonio Spadaro — who has by now become the prince of his interviewers and interpreters — have the closest of working relationships.

In order to call the synod to “openness” on second marriages, La Civilta Cattolica has made a surprise move. It has dusted off the Council of Trent, precisely that Council which more strictly than any other reaffirmed the unity and indissolubility of the bond of marriage.

That same Council, however, as La Civilta Cattolica recalls, abstained from formally condemning second marriages as practiced in the Eastern Churches, not only among the faithful of the Orthodox rite, but also, in some areas of mixed confession, among Catholics in union with Rome.

What induced the fathers of the Council of Trent to make this gesture that the magazine calls one of “ecumenism” ahead of its time, was the case of Catholics living in the Greek islands of the Republic of Venice who, with the permission of their Latin bishops, attended Orthodox churches and services. The Venetian ambassadors asked the council to allow these Catholics to maintain their “rites,” including the possibility of contracting second marriages in the case of adultery.

After an animated discussion, the council fathers approved the request with 97 votes against 80, and reformulated the canon that reaffirmed the indissolubility of marriage, avoiding any direct condemnation of the Eastern practice of second marriages.

The author of the article, Fr. Giancarlo Pani, a professor of Christian history at the University of Rome La Sapienza, reconstructs the debate that took place at the Council of Trent with a wealth of details and with all the references to the passages from the Gospels and from the Church Fathers made by the bishops and cardinals who spoke at the Council.

But when his turn came to examine the practice of the undivided Church of the first centuries, Fr. Pani falls back entirely on the reconstruction made by Giovanni Cereti in the 1977 book Divorce, new marriages, and penance in the primitive Church, which was also the main, if not the only, source of reference used by Cardinal Kasper in his address to the consistory in February of 2014, ignoring all of the subsequent studies conducted by illustrious patrologists like Henri Crouzel and Gilles Pelland, also Jesuits, who tore this reconstruction to shreds.

The thesis that emerges from this article of La Civilta Cattolica is that Trent made a gesture of “evangelical mercy” that the synod should adopt and reinforce, on behalf of “those Christians who suffer through a failed conjugal relationship.”

In reality, there was no beginning of “openness” to second marriages at Trent, but simply the decision not to enter into direct conflict on this point with the Orthodox Churches, with a prudence that was also exercised over the previous centuries and maintained afterward.

The exceptional case of the Greek islands of the Republic of Venice was extinguished with the loss of those islands at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. And it was not reproduced again in the communities that switched from Orthodoxy to union with the Church of Rome, which asked for a preliminary confession of faith with the express indication of the impossibility of a second marriage.