Synod in Rome: Pope Francis and the Antinomians

By Jason Berry
GlobalPost
October 9, 2014

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/belief/synod-pope-francis-antinomians

In 2002, on a sunny fall day in Rome, I asked a canon lawyer why the Vatican derailed a 1989 request by American bishops for a free hand to defrock sex abusers. Only the pope held that power — if bishops had more flexibility to dismiss abusers it might have preempted scandals to come.

The priest told me that US diocesan tribunals “violated grandly – terribly – the annulments of marriage.” What, I asked, did marriage annulments have to do with pedophilia?

“Laxity on annulments,” he fumed, showed an “antinomian mentality” – against moral law. Too many annulments let people freely remarry, weakening church law. Thus, Rome would give no ground on sex abusers, the logic went.

An earthquake has happened since then. Pope Benedict improved the procedure for laicizing sex abusers. But the Vatican moved so slowly, failing to confront complicit bishops, that the scandals took a huge toll on church moral authority – the issue that drew the ire of that canon lawyer.

Many divorced Catholics now remarry without annulments. No studies pinpoint how many take communion despite church prohibition but “antinomian” dynamics are a flashpoint issue at the synod, or international bishops’ gathering, that opened Sunday at the Vatican.

Most synods are boring. This one, on family issues, has at least two potent story lines: Pope Francis’s agenda of “radical mercy” for a changing church, and his shakeup of old-guard figures in the Roman Curia.