In the November newsletter, Steve marks the 45th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World and the Family Life Center’s 34th anniversary. He tells the story of the Sunday in 1989 when he could no longer give communion as a Presbyterian pastor, and how Section 84 of that document, on marriage and the Eucharist, set him on the path into the Catholic Church. He then explains why he sees Amoris Laetitia as a break from that teaching and from the Catechism. Recalling Sr. Lucia of Fatima’s warning that the final battle would be fought over marriage and the family, he says that time has arrived. He commits the Family Life Center to defending the Church’s timeless teaching on marriage and family.
The Final Battle & The Future of the Catholic Church
It was a Sunday morning worship service at my Presbyterian congregation in late October 1989. I had just finished my sermon from Hosea when I sat down for the offertory hymn. What followed was the longest five minutes of my life.
I had been researching the true Christian perspective on lifelong marriage for about a decade. Youth ministry experience taught me how important it is for Christian parents to stay married. Otherwise, it creates formidable obstacles to stable Christian maturity. Divorce not only fractured a marriage, but it also created a psychological crater inside the children of divorce.
In the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi quoted God saying, “I hate divorce.” What was the reason for this bold statement? God said he hated divorce because he desired “godly offspring.”
From the very beginning, God’s covenant with mankind and the marriage covenant are interwoven. It’s not a coincidence that the first time God’s covenant name (YHWH) is mentioned in Genesis 2, the first marriage is mentioned toward the end of the same chapter. Our relationship with God and our marriages are inextricably linked like the dual connected strands of DNA.
The book of Hosea shows the dark side of when God’s covenant people become unfaithful. Hosea’s wife had left him and became a prostitute. The prophet’s unfaithful wife became a 3-D depiction of Israel’s unfaithfulness. With devastating effectiveness, Hosea used his wife’s adultery as a picture of Israel’s apostasy. Both were unthinkable, but terribly true. Adultery and apostasy formed a double helix.
I Preached Myself Out of the Evangelical Church
After my sermon, I sat down during the offertory to prepare myself for communion. During those five minutes, I experienced a very direct command from God. It wasn’t spoken out loud, but it was intense, specific, and shocking. God authoritatively said, “You are not doing this.”
I instinctively knew what this was about: the link between marital union and union with God in communion. Marital irregularities existed in my congregation, some stemming from my defective advice and counsel. Marital irregularities and communion don’t go together.
I walked to the communion table and said, “I apologize, but I am unprepared to administer communion this morning.” I pronounced a benediction and proceeded down the aisle, followed by my elders. It was the last time I ever administered communion in a Protestant church.
I explained to my elders why I couldn’t administer communion that day, or any Sunday. In the kindest possible manner, they said, “You know then that you are finished here.” They allowed me to stay as pastor until the end of December.
My Path Out of Ecclesiastical No-Man’s Land
The following week, I felt a profound loneliness—not personal, but ecclesiastical. I had preached myself out of the Protestant Church, yet my Evangelical prejudices kept me from considering the Catholic Church. Here I was, a pastor in an ecclesiastical no-man’s-land.
By mid-week, I searched for someone who shared my beliefs. I finally reached for a dusty, paperback volume of post-Vatican II documents sitting unread on my bookshelf. I flipped
the pages, asking myself, “I wonder what the Catholic Church believes about all this?”
And then I found what I was looking for – and a thousand times more than what I could imagine. It was a document entitled The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World, by Pope St. John Paul II.
I was truly surprised that Pope John Paul II didn’t water down indissoluble lifelong Christian marriage as practically every Protestant denomination had done. He was 100% in sync with Jesus’ teaching and the early Church Fathers.
Reading Section 84 Changed My Life
After giving an exhortation for the Church to reach out to charitably welcome people who have suffered a divorce, John Paul II tackled the indissolubility of marriage and its relationship to communion. This is what he wrote:
“However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist.” Section 84.
I was completely floored. Here was a Catholic pope proclaiming the profound link between marriage and communion. He drew a line separating the divorced and remarried (without an annulment) and communion due to an objective contradiction between their marital state and the Eucharist.
John Paul II concluded Section 84 by explaining the important practical reason for his statement:
Besides this, there is another special pastoral reason: if these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church’s teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.
I no longer felt alone in the world due to my beliefs about marriage and communion.
Section 84 launched me on the path to becoming a Catholic.
The Birth of the Family Life Center
About a year after becoming a Catholic, I had the privilege of hearing John Paul II in person at the first Pro-life Summit sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of the Family. In his address, the pope said that the only way to end abortion and other assaults on life is to bring people back to God, the author of life.
As I sat there listening to the pope, I asked myself, “How do we bring the modern world back to God?” John Paul interrupted my thoughts and said that the way to bring the world back to God is through the family. When he said that, I knew deep down that I had just received marching orders for the rest of my life.
One year later, in 1992, I launched the Family Life Center International. Our mission is to bring the world back to God through the timeless marital and family teaching of the Catholic Faith. I traveled thousands of miles all over North America, eagerly spreading the rock-solid truth I found in Catholicism.
The 911 Call from Our Theological Advisor
Fast forward to April 2016, I received a concerned phone call from the Family Life Center’s theological advisor, Fr. Dennis Cooney. He knew all about my pilgrimage to the Catholic Church. A new Apostolic Exhortation on marriage, Amoris Laetitia, made a 180-degree switch from John Paul II’s Section 84, with an infamous footnote slipped into a 40,000-word document. Fr. Cooney was concerned this theological about-face would push me out of the Church.
Amoris Laetitia was unsettling beyond description, yet I decided not to bail, but to stay and fight.
The Amoris Laetitia footnote said that some divorced and civilly remarried Catholics in certain objectively irregular situations may still receive the Eucharist. Footnote 351 in section 305 followed another innovation. Section 301 said, “Hence, it can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace.”
Some misinformed Catholic pundits argued that Amoris Laetitia’s footnote 351 was a development of doctrine, or that it somehow harmonized with Section 84 of The Role of the Christian Family. It wasn’t, and it was plain to see. This wasn’t development; it was a stark contradiction of 2,000 years of Catholic moral teaching.
Is Ignoring the Catechism a Development of Doctrine?
How could a Vatican document contradict the teaching of a Pope who was made a saint just two years earlier? Why does Amoris Laetitia contradict the Catechism of the Catholic Church?
Today there are numerous Catholics in many countries who have recourse to civil divorce and contract new civil unions. In fidelity to the words of Jesus Christ—“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery”—the Church maintains that a new union cannot be recognized as valid, if the first marriage was. If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Eucharistic communion as long as this situation persists. CCC 1650
The remarriage of persons divorced from a living, lawful spouse contravenes the plan and law of God as taught by Christ. They are not separated from the Church, but they cannot receive Eucharistic communion. CCC 1665, summarizing 1650
A Moral and Theological Time Bomb
Professor Josef Seifert is an internationally recognized Catholic philosopher and a strong defender of objective truth and moral absolutes, in harmony with John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical, The Splendor of Truth. He called Amoris Laetitia a “moral theological atomic bomb.” Why?
If you can call one objectively mortal sin something that is no longer a mortal sin, then the same principle of negation can be applied to other intrinsic mortal sins. He lost his professorship due to pointing out Amoris Laetitia’s implications.
Here’s the Terrifying Plan That Will Torpedo the Church
Amoris Laetitia is just the first step in a subtle rationalization of sexual sin. The next step is finding certain situations where homosexual acts are not mortal sins. If you doubt this could possibly be true, then listen to what is said in Section 297:
“No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel! Here I am not speaking only of the divorced and remarried, but of everyone, in whatever situation they find themselves.”
Make no mistake: the Catholic Church is heading towards the rationalization of homosexual acts, perhaps buried in another footnote. Liberal Protestant denominations have already morally justified homosexual acts. Will Catholics be next? This brings us to the final battle.
The Final Battle
You may have heard about the dire warning that Sr. Lucia, one of the three Fatima children, gave near the end of her life.
As Cardinal Caffarra was facing hurdles in establishing the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family, Sr. Lucia wrote the Cardinal, saying:
“There will come a time when the decisive confrontation between the Kingdom of God and Satan will take place over marriage and the family.”
The Institute founded by Cardinal Caffarra ceased to exist on September 8, 2017. It was replaced by a new institute headed by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia – famous for his pro-homosexual leanings. The archbishop, along with some other members of the Catholic hierarchy, is in favor of giving Holy Communion to those living in what the Church has always considered an objective and active state of adultery.
The time Sr. Lucia warned about has arrived.
November 22nd is the 45th anniversary of The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World. This November is also the Family Life Center’s 34th anniversary. These two have been bonded together since our founding.
So, this November, I thought it wise to reflect not only on the Family Life Center’s past years, but also to ask, “Where are we now, and what should we do?”
Your Mission If You Choose to Accept It
The mission seems quite clear. We are living in a time when timeless Catholic truths about the sanctity of the marriage covenant and the foundations of Catholic morality are being debated and in danger of being eclipsed. Our job is to ensure families in our modern world continue to hear those truths. It’s that simple.
Therefore, the Family Life Center will vigorously oppose all attempts to subvert the marriage, family, and moral teachings of St. John Paul II in The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World (especially section 84) and as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that was published under his pontificate (especially sections 1650, 1665, 2384, and 2390).
The crisis is not behind us. We must all be prepared to defend timeless Catholic truths in battles ahead.
I want to express my deepest gratitude for your generous support that has made possible the voice of St. John Paul II to reverberate through our outreaches to the modern world. For 34 years, friends like you have enabled the Family Life Center to continue bringing these truths to families.
Yours in His Majesty’s Service,
Steve Wood
P.S. Our popular resource, Help for Hurting Marriages, is now available on YouTube and at BibleforCatholics.com/marriagehelp. Share the link with friends and family who would benefit from encouragement and support.
P.P.S. This November is the 45th anniversary of St. John Paul’s The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World. Would you consider a special anniversary gift to help carry his voice to the next generation of families? Donations can be made here.
Our Mission
The Family Life Center International is dedicated to promoting and strengthening the family, the marriage covenant, the sanctity of all innocent human life, and the historic Christian faith.
“The future of the world and of the Church passes through the family.”
— POPE ST. JOHN PAUL II, FAMILIARIS CONSORTIO 75
“…The family urgently needs to be helped and supported.”
— POPE ST. JOHN PAUL II, EVANGELIUM VITAE, 24