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Posted on 10/08/2026 10:41:46 AM PDT by ebb tide
There are many ways to open a Vatican gathering on marriage.
One could begin with Cana.
One could begin with Christ’s words on the indissolubility of marriage: “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”
One could read St. Paul on the union of husband and wife as an image of Christ and His Church. One could remind bishops that Our Lord restored marriage to its original dignity after fallen man had distorted it.
Or, apparently, one could describe Jesus Christ as flirting with a woman living with a man who was not her husband.
Welcome to the tenth-anniversary celebration of Amoris Laetitia.
During the October 7 opening session in the Paul VI Audience Hall, Dominican Sister Helen Alford, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, presented an interpretation of Christ’s encounter with the Samaritan woman drawn from fellow Dominican Fr. Michael Paluch.
Alford acknowledged that the terminology was deliberately provocative. The first stage of the encounter, she explained, could be called a “flirt”: “a conversation between a woman and a man who are both alone.” As Christ leads the conversation deeper, she said, “the ambiguity persists.” Only later, when He confronts the woman with the reality that she has had five husbands and that the man she currently has is not her husband, does she supposedly realize: “This man is not just flirting.”
This is not somebody’s hostile reconstruction. Vatican News itself summarized Alford’s meditation by describing the opening phase of the encounter as a “flirt,” “usefully provocative,” with an initial ambiguity that remains until Christ confronts the woman with the truth. (Vatican News)
The Son of God.
At Jacob’s well.
Leading a sinner toward revelation of Himself as the Messiah.
And the Vatican’s marriage summit opens with romantic ambiguity.
Disgusting.
Our Lord Was Converting Her, Not “Flirting”
The problem goes beyond bad taste.
“Flirt” has a meaning. It involves the suggestion of romantic or sexual attraction, however playful or unserious. Applying that category to Christ’s conduct with the Samaritan woman imports precisely the ambiguity into the Gospel that the interpreter then congratulates Christ for eventually transcending.
The Fathers somehow missed this thrilling exegetical possibility.
St. John Chrysostom saw Christ’s knowledge of the woman’s marital history as a manifestation of His divine power. When Christ tells her she has had five husbands and the man she now has is not her husband, Chrysostom calls it a reproof and marvels that she receives it meekly. The encounter raises her from concern about ordinary water to concern about doctrine, worship and finally the Messiah. (Bible Hub)
St. Augustine likewise reads the passage spiritually and morally. Christ reveals what the woman has hidden and draws her beyond the senses toward truth. (New Advent)
Neither Doctor seems to have discovered the “flirt stage.”
That achievement had to await 2026.
And notice what is being done to the scene. Christ does indeed begin gently. He asks for water. He allows the woman to speak. He leads rather than browbeats.
Then He exposes the truth.
“You have had five husbands.”
“The one whom you now have is not your husband.”
Modern pastoral theology loves the first half of that movement—encounter, conversation, accompaniment, graduality—and becomes visibly nervous when the second half arrives. So even the Gospel passage in which Christ eventually names the woman’s irregular sexual situation gets repackaged as a lesson in relational ambiguity.
The irony is thick enough to spread with a knife.
This Was the Opening Act for Amoris Laetitia
The setting makes the language worse.
Alford was speaking at the opening of Leo XIV’s weeklong Vatican gathering marking ten years since Francis promulgated Amoris Laetitia. The official program describes the event as a week of listening, synodal discernment and dialogue about the steps local Churches should now take in light of the document. (Amoris Laetitia)
Leo personally convened it.
And if anyone was still waiting for him to quietly disown Francis’s revolution in marriage discipline, Wednesday should have cured the condition.
Leo called the postconciliar journey on marriage and family “long and fruitful.”
He called Amoris Laetitia “an important stage.”
He said ten years of receiving the document had become part of the life of local Churches.
He asked the assembled bishops to recognize what Christ had been teaching His Church through those ten years.
Then he asked them to gather “the fruits that Amoris Laetitia has borne” so those fruits could “nourish the whole Church.” He wants the process continued, episcopal conferences to discern from the experience, and local Churches to recognize “new paths.” Those are Leo’s words and his framework. (Vatican)
The fantasy that Leo was preparing to bury Amoris Laetitia can now be buried instead.
Let Us Remember What the “Fruits” Actually Were
There is a temptation to let ten years of ecclesiastical fog turn the original controversy fuzzy.
It was not fuzzy.
Amoris Laetitia stated that a person may be living in an “objective situation of sin” while lacking full subjective culpability and may therefore live and grow in grace with “the help of the Church.” Footnote 351 added that this help could, “in certain cases,” include the sacraments. (Vatican)
Then the bishops of the Buenos Aires pastoral region supplied the practical interpretation.
Their guidelines said that in some “complex circumstances,” where continence could not in practice be achieved and mitigating factors diminished culpability, Amoris Laetitia opened the possibility of access to Confession and the Eucharist for divorced persons living in a new union. (Vatican)
Francis answered that there were “no other interpretations.”
And in 2023 Fernández’s doctrinal office reaffirmed precisely that reading, explicitly discussing possible sacramental access for some divorced persons living in a new union. (Vatican)
There is your famous ambiguity.
It somehow always resolves in one direction.
The old discipline required a person bound by a valid marriage who was living with another partner to cease adulterous relations before receiving Holy Communion.
The new pastoral framework discovered cases where the objective situation remained, sexual relations could remain, and sacramental access might nevertheless occur through discernment.
Traditional Catholics objected because Eucharistic discipline suddenly appeared detached from the public moral reality of the relationship.
Ten years later, Leo is not correcting that inheritance.
He is celebrating its anniversary.
Where Are the Men Who Told Trads to Wait?
This is where the soothing industry deserves some attention.
For months after Leo’s election, respectable traditional Catholic commentary kept finding reasons to wait.
Give him time.
He is cautious.
He is different from Francis.
Watch the appointments.
Watch the liturgy.
He may quietly reverse the excesses.
He cannot say everything immediately.
Perhaps Traditionis Custodes will go.
Perhaps Fiducia Supplicans will go.
Perhaps Amoris Laetitia will be clarified back into Catholicism.
Wait.
How much waiting is enough?
Leo has now personally convened a worldwide episcopal meeting to mark Amoris Laetitia’s tenth anniversary and has praised its “fruits,” described it as an “important stage,” and asked the bishops to continue discerning “new paths.” (Vatican)
At some point optimism becomes refusal to read the document in front of you.
Anyone who sold Catholics the theory that Leo represented a substantive repudiation of the Francis program now owns a problem.
He is doing the opposite.
Where are they?
Perhaps drafting another piece explaining why this too secretly proves Leo is a restorationist.
Experience Gets a Vote
Leo’s address contains another passage worth dwelling on.
He asks what “the lived experience of families” is teaching the Church—an experience, he says, “from which we have not yet fully learned.”
That line sits at the center of the entire modern dispute.
Christian morality has always moved from revealed truth toward the concrete case. The contemporary method increasingly allows the concrete case to interrogate the norm. Experience becomes a source of pressure upon doctrine.
The gap between Christian sexual morality and contemporary sexual behavior becomes evidence that “pastoral language” may need changing. Irregular situations become schools from which the Church has “not yet fully learned.” The Holy Spirit is said to speak through challenging situations, and those situations must question us so the Church can discover “renewed ways” of offering sacramental grace. (Vatican)
Read that beside the Samaritan-woman meditation.
First comes ambiguity. Then experience. Then encounter. Then discernment.
Then perhaps truth, eventually, once everybody has sufficiently resonated.
Christ at the well actually does something rather less fashionable.
He knows her circumstances completely.
And He tells her that the man she has is not her husband.
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Leo’s address contains another passage worth dwelling on.
He asks what “the lived experience of families” is teaching the Church—an experience, he says, “from which we have not yet fully learned.”
That line sits at the center of the entire modern dispute.
Christian morality has always moved from revealed truth toward the concrete case. The contemporary method increasingly allows the concrete case to interrogate the norm. Experience becomes a source of pressure upon doctrine.
The gap between Christian sexual morality and contemporary sexual behavior becomes evidence that “pastoral language” may need changing. Irregular situations become schools from which the Church has “not yet fully learned.” The Holy Spirit is said to speak through challenging situations, and those situations must question us so the Church can discover “renewed ways” of offering sacramental grace. (Vatican)
It’s an infestation of blasphemy and heresy.
I do think that since a spouse can be legally divorced without his or her consent due to no-fault divorce the injured party should be held innocent of dissolving the marriage. I think withholding Holy Communion from that spouse is uncharitable. This would only pertain to an ex spouse who has not remarried. Since that first marriage is still valid even if it was ended in civil court.
I know the usual solution is to tell the injured spouse to get an annulment but that is the wrong answer and very unfair to the spouse who held to his or her vows and Church teaching on marriage.
I should add a P.S. I think in the case where the non injured spouse has remarried (even after a faux annulment) they too should be denied Communion when it is shown the injured spouse raised verifiable objections. Because in the American church it is most likely the reasons given were a sham.
No one is denied Communion because of divorce. It is the attempted adulterous marriage after divorce that blocks someone from Communion. Even in that case, if they agree to live without marital relations they can go to Communion. It is the acts of adultery while a previous valid marriage still exists that blocks someone from communion.
“It’s an infestation of blasphemy and heresy.”
The New Testament is filled with warnings of false teachers. This “lesson” is just another example.
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Oystir, Cronos: Do you guys get it yet?
Synodalism is not Catholicism!
I stand corrected. I know that, but had a temporary glitch to back when divorce itself was considered (wrongly so) a bar to Holy Communion.
It was never considered wrong for a divorced celibate person to be barred from Holy Communion.
Some priests did tell people that. That is why I wrote (wrongly so).
Are you sure of that? I find it very hard to believe that they did so.
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