The Quebecoise Alternative to the St. Gallen Mafia
Cardinal Marc Ouellet, author of Mystery and Sacrament of Love, does not think it possible to allow Communion to the divorced and remarried without doing violence to the sacramental ontology
One of the sobering thoughts about our present times is that two of the top papabile candidates at the last conclave were scholars who had devoted their intellectual work to the development of the Church’s understanding of the sacrament of marriage: Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan, and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the former Primate of Canada who is now the Prefect for the Congregation of Bishops.
These two men were definitely not members of the “St. Gallen mafia”, the name Cardinal Danneels recently used to describe his club of senior clerics who plotted to undermine the theological work of the JPII-BXVI papacies. They were and remain men close to the heart of St. John Paul II’s theological vision of the Catholic family as an icon of the love of the Holy Trinity and as the foundation of a re-evangelised western civilisation, based on a union of Christian charity and Christian reason.
A synthesis of Cardinal Scola’s theological vision can be found in his book The Nuptial Mystery, published by Eerdmans in 2005. It was followed by Ouellet’s Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family, also published by Eerdmans, in 2006. Now, in 2015, Eerdmans has published a further work by Cardinal Ouellet entitled Mystery and Sacrament of Love: A Theology of Marriage and the Family for the New Evangelisation.
The three works complement each other. Along with St. John Paul II’s Catechesis on Human Love, these three books offer the richest and most mature expression of the post-conciliar Catholic theology of marriage. The trilogy makes a great gift to newly minted priests as ordination presents.
The Nuptial Mystery focuses on the notion of nuptiality and its significance for the discipline of theology in general, not merely for the theology of marriage. Divine Likeness is focused on the relationship between the Holy Trinity and the human family and is, technically speaking, a work of theological anthropology. The latest book, Mystery and Sacrament of Love, amplifies and deepens themes in the earlier works with particular attention given to issues in sacramental theology, including the relationship between marriage and the Eucharist and the relationship between the priesthood and the sacraments of Eucharist and marriage.
At the risk of sounding polemical, one could say that it is the theological vision outlined in these three works, built as it was on St. John Paul II’s Catechesis on Human Love, that Cardinals Kasper and Danneels and their colleagues in the St. Gallen mafia want to suppress as all too lofty and difficult.
Cardinal Ouellet however hopes that the ideas presented in The Mystery and Sacrament of Love will offer a blue-print for a ‘pastoral conversion’ rooted in a ‘theological conversion’.
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