firstthings.com/article/2015/01/between-two-synods
Here are parts of a new, excellent essay by George Weigel (I would highly recommend reading the whole thing):
"That a thorough examination of the crisis (of marriage), and the celebration of Christian marriage as the answer to it, didn’t happen to the degree one might have hoped. And that was in no small part the doing of German bishops led by retired Cardinal Walter Kasper, in league with the synod general secretary, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, who seemed determined to push the question of Holy Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to the front of the line in the synod’s debates. The German fixation on this issue was in one sense an expression of self-absorption with the pastoral problems of a sclerotic German Church, which are indisputably grave. Ten months before the synod met, I asked a knowledgeable observer of German Catholic affairs why the German Catholic leadership insisted on revisiting the issue of Holy Communion for those in civil second marriages, which most of the rest of the world Church thought had been sufficiently aired in the 1980 synod on the family, and which seemed to have been settled by the reaffirmation of the Church’s traditional teaching and practice in St. John Paul II’s 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio (The Community of the Family) and in the 1983 code of canon law. I got a one-word answer: “money.”
“Prior to the synod, extensive critiques of Cardinal Kasper’s proposals for allowing divorced Catholics in civil second marriages to be restored to the Church’s full eucharistic communion were published in the theological quarterly Nova et Vetera and in a book of essays, Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church, whose authors included five scholar-cardinals. In both cases, the responses to the Kasper proposals were academically serious and respectful in tone. Yet Kasper, in replying to his critics (primarily in press interviews), failed to sustain the debate at the level of seriousness it deserved, dismissing those who had found grave biblical, patristic, theological, canonical, and pastoral problems with his proposals as doctrinal and scriptural fundamentalists.”
“The vibrant parts of Catholicism in the developed world are those that have lived the dynamic orthodoxy displayed in the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI; the crumbling parts of European Catholicism—which is to say, most of western European Catholicism—are those that have bent to the winds of the zeitgeist and have fudged the Church’s doctrinal and moral boundaries, imagining that to be the “spirit of Vatican II.” Yet there was Kasper, in league with synod general secretary Baldisseri, promoting a further fudging of the boundaries, and doing so in ways that seemed to the majority of synod fathers (the media spin notwithstanding) to be in flat contradiction to the teaching of the Lord himself.”
“Africa’s Moment. Not surprisingly, the proposals pressed by the Germans and their allies at synod 2014 were presented in much of the mainstream media as something bold, fresh, and innovative, when in fact they were rather stale and shopworn, remnants of a vision of “progressive” Catholicism that had, by any evangelical criterion, manifestly failed in Europe and elsewhere. What was new at the extraordinary synod—and what helped make it “extraordinary” in the ordinary sense of that word—was the emergence of African Catholicism as a major factor in shaping the future of global Catholicism. African synod fathers were among the leaders in challenging the Kasper proposals, arguing forcefully that the Christian idea of marriage had come to their cultures as a liberating force, especially for women. They also suggested, implicitly if not explicitly, that bishops representing dying local churches ought not be exporting Western decadence to the Global South, where Catholicism was growing exponentially by preaching the truths of the Gospel with compassion but also without compromise. This took courage, and not only because it exposed the Africans to charges of being culturally backward (or, as Cardinal Kasper inelegantly put it, of being in thrall to “taboos”). It also took courage because a lot of the Church in Africa is paid for by German Catholic development agencies, which are extraordinarily well off and quite generous, thanks to the Kirchensteuer.”
There is no sin if one does not consent. Going throught the motions at gun point, is not consent.
