Vatican cracks down on divorcees

DIVORCED and separated Roman Catholics must choose between Holy Communion and a sex life, even if they have remarried under civil law, according to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's watchdog of orthodoxy.

Yesterday, in a letter to the world's bishops, the head of the Congregation, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, restated the orthodox position. 'If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God's law. Consequently they cannot receive Holy Communion.'

The Cardinal's letter is believed to have been provoked by an appeal for leniency in these matters made by three German bishops last year. His reply is uncompromising. 'Pastors and confessors . . . have a serious duty to admonish (remarried couples wanting Holy Communion) that such a judgement of conscience openly contradicts the Church's teaching.'

This ban has been widely ignored, as Cardinal Ratzinger's letter makes plain. He lists a number of reasons why priests have given Communion knowingly to remarried Catholics, defended as 'tolerant and benevolent pastoral solutions'. Then he disqualifies all of them. Marriage, he says, is not a contract between two people alone, but 'essentially a public reality', which cannot therefore be dissolved.

Monsignor Michael Quinlan, the Ecclesiastical Adviser for the British Association of Separated and Divorced Catholics, put the best gloss possible on the letter: 'The Cardinal is, as always, right in so far as, if the preceding marriage was valid, then one cannot appeal to private conscience. But in no way would he exclude the Church's approved practice, which includes reference to the forum of conscience.'