Not enough attention has been drawn to how the liberal proposals at the Synod conflate righteousness and respectability, communion and “community.” The starkest statement of this conflation came on Monday, from Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Australia. In a Vatican press conference, Coleridge said: “A second marriage that is enduring and stable and loving and where there are children who are cared for is not the same as a couple skulking off to a hotel room for a wicked weekend.” For this reason, “just to say that every second marriage or second union whatever you want to call it is adulterous, is perhaps too sweeping.”
Coleridge has spoken with admirable candor throughout the synod, and his comments here bring the issue into sharp relief. Does the church oppose sin, or only sordidness? When a man abandons his wife, does it matter whether the other woman waits for him in a house or in a hotel room? Is adultery a sin committed only by the impulsive, the cash-strapped, the time-pressed? Or can it also be executed by men with ample capital and orderly habits?
