Over 100 adult converts to the Catholic faith, most of them Americans, have signed an open letter calling upon the Synod of Bishops to affirm Catholic teaching on the indissolubility of marriage.
The signatories include an Australian bishop (Bishop Peter Elliott), the head of the ordinariate for former Anglicans in the United States (Msgr. Jeffrey Steenson), and dozens of laity, many of them associated with universities. In a letter published by Aleteia on October 5, they expressed their
concerns about certain proposals to change the Church’s discipline regarding communion for Catholics who are divorced and civilly remarried. We are frankly surprised by the opinion of some who are proposing a “way of penance” that would tolerate what the Church has never allowed.
In our judgment such proposals fail to do justice to the irrevocability of the marriage bond, either by writing off the “first” marriage as if it were somehow “dead,” or, worse, by recognizing its continued existence but then doing violence to it. We do not see how these proposals can do anything other than contradict the Christian doctrine of marriage itself. But we also fail to see how such innovations can be, as they claim, either pastoral or merciful.