The Church needs to find solutions to its
treatment of remarried divorcees, who cannot all be seen as sinners
without distinction. This was the essence of the Bishop of Basel, Mgr. Felix Gmur’s message to the press this morning: “People’s relationships differ: both in marriage, which the Church sees as a family, and in other “quasi-familial” relations.”
“Take a girl who lives with her mother and the mother’s partner, for example: relations within the family, with the Church and with the human body and sexuality need to be re-thought. Not all people live their lives in the way that we think they should. For example, there are those who have been married, divorced and are have now re-married, but are considered sinners and so are not allowed to receive communion,” Gmur said.
“This situation needs to be reviewed, Gmur said, because each case is different. I know one couple who have been married for 50 years and both of them had been married for a short period of time before meeting each other. Don’t these 50 years count for something? Are these couples nothing more than sinners? Perhaps the Church needs to consider a new way of treating such cases. I believe this issue needs to be taken seriously; even the Pope has said so. He has still not indicated a path to take to resolve the problem. Perhaps he is thinking about how to address it.”