What Argentina’s ‘Amoris Laetitia’ Guidelines Really Mean [can it be interpreted as a Kasper loss?]

When Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) was released in April, it was already clear that an unusual moment in the life of the Church had been reached. The September disclosure of guidelines formulated by Argentinian bishops — and explicitly endorsed personally by the Holy Father himself in a very peculiar manner — has served to reinforce [this].

Pope Francis clearly wanted to change the Church’s practice on the admission of the divorced and civilly remarried to holy Communion, but could not get the synod of bishops to agree. It was an example of the Holy Spirit guiding the magisterium of the Church through the bishops against their head rather than in concert with him. Thus...Amoris Laetitia was ambiguous, employing hints buried in footnotes and deceptive citations of previous magisterial teaching.

It did not teach what its author clearly wanted to teach, which meant that it could still be read, with some difficulties, in continuity with what the Church had taught before....

...The guidelines of the Buenos Aires bishops would not permit the approach of the Holy Father himself in the April 2014 phone call to Argentina. They would not permit the Kasper proposal.... despite the clear desire to frame such things in such a way as not to hand their former archbishop another apparent defeat, this time is his own city.

The real news from Buenos Aires is that, in the very city where one presumes Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio had been privately advising such couples to go to Communion during his years as archbishop, the bishops did not endorse the Kasper proposal...

Far from breathing new life into the Kasper proposal, the Buenos Aires guidelines may well be where the proposal definitively died — and the Holy Father finally accepted it.

Fr. deSouza suggests this may be an oblique example of the Holy Spirit preventing Pope Francis from actually transcribing his errors into Church Law. DeSouza says that even the bishops of Argentina --- a group reputed to be very amenable to FrancisJive --- can't bring themselves to actually endorse the Kasper proposal.

Once again it;'s this sickening pattern of equivocating language: deliberate, corruptly crafted ambiguity.

Bad as that is in terms of misleading the faithful and proliferating confusion of conscience, the one glimmer of hope --- argues DeSouza --- is that even the clerics furthest down in Francis' inside vest pocket, can't goose themselves into actually saying "Here we go: Communion for the divorced-remarried is now on the pastoral menu."

It's been said that though the Pope can't change Catholic Doctrine, he CAN OK pastoral casuistry and thus change Catholic culture, which is fully as bad as changing doctrine in practice.

It's hard to dispute that. But isn't it strange, really, that Pope Francis can keep speeding the car right up to the cliff, leave it teetering there, with gravel spraying and rockfalls clattering out all around it, but can't quite plunge it over the edge.

Read DeSouza for an interesting perspective on how the Holy Spirit's brakes--- His protection --- may be working in this case.

It's so essential not to give in to the Adversary's strategic objective, which is to get people to exit the teetering car.

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