New cardinal says banning divorced, ‘re-married’ from Communion an ‘enormous injustice’

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New cardinal says banning divorced, ‘re-married’ from Communion an ‘enormous injustice’
Denying Holy Communion to some people who are divorced and ‘re-married’ is a ‘huge, enormous injustice,’ 

Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco of Algiers told LifeSite.



Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco OP. Dec, 2024

Dec 12, 2024
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews - slightly adapted) — The new cardinal of Algiers has welcomed Amoris Laetitia’s openness for the divorced and “re-married” to receive Holy Communion, saying that for him adultery is only “when you have two people in your life at the same time.”

In 2015, Bishop Jean-Paul Vesco, OP of the Diocese of Oran in North Africa made waves in the Catholic Church for his harsh criticism of the Church’s teaching regarding divorced and “re-married” persons. “The Church’s discipline regarding divorced and remarried couples has long troubled me, even revolted me, because of the unnecessary suffering it inflicts on individuals without consideration for their unique situations,” he stated at the time.

The Church has consistently taught that divorced and “re-married” people are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, since they are living in a state of grave sin. This teaching is enshrined in canon law.

However, in 2016, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia infamously contained a passage allowing for divorced and “re-married” to approach and receive Holy Communion. After widespread consternation and requests for clarification from leading lay theologians and cardinals, Francis then affirmed to the bishops of Buenos Aires that this was indeed the intention of the document and that there were “no other interpretations.”

Speaking to this correspondent in Rome on the weekend he was made cardinal, 62-year-old Cardinal Vesco reiterated his criticism of the Church’s prohibition for the divorced and “re-married” to receive Holy Communion, and praised Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia for rejecting that prior teaching.

READ: PHOTOS: 21 new cardinals created by Pope Francis at the Vatican

“It was a huge, enormous injustice,” the French Dominican said, about the Church’s teaching prohibiting such individuals from receiving Holy Communion. (Full interview below.)

Speaking about the time before 2016, Vesco told LifeSite that “what we said, what the Church said about these women [divorced and ‘re-married’] was that they were adulterers. And that therefore they were adulterers and that if you don’t come out of this sin of adultery, well you can’t receive the other sacraments. That’s the question.”

Catholic teaching denotes adultery as “marital infidelity,” as an instance “when two partners, of whom at least one is married to another party, have sexual relations – even transient ones – they commit adultery. Christ condemns even adultery of mere desire.”

In the Gospels, Christ notes that those actively desirous of such relations are guilty of them, even if such individuals do not manage to attain their desires and have sexual relations. (Matt. 5:28)

But in Vesco’s view, “adultery” was a word too readily used in ecclesial circles prior to Amoris Laetitia’s release. “For me, adultery is when you have two people in your life at the same time.”

Vesco opined that for the Church to use the label of adultery for all cases “wasn’t true or just”:

To say adultery in all situations was simply something that wasn’t true or just. When you have one person who – as I had recently – a person who was widowed, who [then] after a while remarried with a person who was divorced: because in her life, she’s not an adulterer, neither one nor the other is an adulterer.

Vesco – Archbishop of Algiers since 2021 – welcomed Francis’ Amoris Laetitia for ushering in a signal shift in practice: “So it was good that finally, simply as is written in Amoris Laetitia, nobody can look at this [critically] because it is love.”

“It’s one thing to leave someone for someone else and leave two families in the lurch, it’s another to have been left by someone, by your partner and then one day make the choice of life again and fall in love again and rebuild something and have children. And that’s it,” commented Vesco.

He reiterated his criticism of the Church viewing such situations in the same light: “That was an injustice, and the Church couldn’t afford that – our Mother the Church couldn’t afford that.”

In June 2016, a group of leading theologians presented the College of Cardinals with an in-depth list of errors in Amoris Laetitia, including the admittance of the divorced and “re-married” as one of 11 heretical propositions in the document.

Then four cardinals famously issued a dubia requesting clarification from the Pope, which remains unanswered. In the meantime, the Vatican has pushed forward with implementing the norms of Amoris Laetitia and has inserted the document into the magisterium.

Speaking to this correspondent, Vesco praised Francis’ text as a way “to look at the situations of people, to discern, and then in the face of this to reconcile these people with the Church, to bring them back into the body of the Church.”

He downplayed the possibility of being seen as an advocate for divorce, saying instead that divorce is “an accident in life” which one must “repair” when it happens.


LifeSite’s interview with Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco