Recent decades have been marked by an especially fiery debate in the Catholic Church over the question of admitting civilly divorced and remarried Catholics (whose first sacramental marriage is valid) to eucharistic communion. This issue was central during the two synods of bishops on marriage and the family in 2014 and 2015. After Pope Francis’s publication of the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia in March 2016, the debate has only heated up given divergent interpretations of the exhortation and its bearing on Church doctrine and pastoral practice. Some may be surprised to know that those supportive of opening a pathway for admission in certain cases appeal to none other than Joseph Ratzinger, the late Pope Benedict XVI. In fact, in Cardinal Walter Kasper’s pivotal address to the Extraordinary Consistory of Cardinals in February 2014, an address that set the groundwork for the synods, he cited Ratzinger as being an inspiration for his proposal that would admit divorced and remarried Catholics to communion in certain special cases. Kasper was referring to a now well-known essay that Ratzinger published in 1972.

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