Posted on 04/15/2016 1:50:20 AM PDT by markomalley
Last week we reached the beginning of the end of the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio — the ‘great reformer’ of the Catholic church who, it appears, has been unable to deliver the reforms that he himself favours. This despite being Pope.
On Friday, he published a 200-page ‘exhortation’ entitled Amoris Laetitia, ‘The Joy of Love’ (or ‘The Joy of Sex’, as English-speaking Catholics of a certain vintage immediately christened it). This was Francis’s long-awaited response to two Vatican synods on the family, in 2014 and last year, which descended into Anglican-style bickering between liberals and conservatives.
At the heart of the disputes lay the question of whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion. Until now they have been banned from doing so because the Church teaches that their first marriages are still valid and therefore their current union is (though the word is diplomatically avoided) adulterous. Also, though this is one bit of the New Testament that Protestants seem to have forgotten, if there was one thing Jesus couldn’t stand it was divorce.
Even traditionalists don’t like refusing the sacrament to devout Catholic couples, when one of the pair had a disastrous ‘trial marriage’ many years earlier. But they do refuse, because they believe that is God’s teaching. Meanwhile, more easygoing priests have adopted a policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.
Most cardinals at the two synods didn’t want to waste time on the ban on Communion for divorcees. But one ancient German prelate did. Cardinal Walter Kasper has been worrying away at this problem for half a century, proposing this or that ‘route’ by which the ban could be relaxed.
No one paid much attention. Then — in what I think will be seen as the defining disastrous moment of his reign — the newly elected Pope Francis decided to make Kasper’s long-forgotten plans the basis for discussion at the 2014 synod. Eighteen months of chaos followed. To cut a long story short, the 2015 synod told the Pope that the Kasper plan was unacceptable, especially to the conservative churches of Africa.
This left Francis with a fallback position that would have somehow devolved divorce-and-Communion questions to local bishops. But he’d have to impose it on the Church with no mandate from the synod. As last Friday approached, everyone was asking: will he or won’t he?
Like many Catholic journalists, I was sent a copy of Amoris Laetitia on Thursday night. I checked, several times, the bits where Francis could have dismantled the ban or devolved the power to do so to bishops’ conferences. He didn’t. Instead, we were told that priests should ‘accompany [the divorced and remarried] in helping them to understand their situation according to the teaching of the Church and the guidelines of the bishop’.
In other words, yadda, yadda, yadda, since the Pope was just quoting existing teaching. I couldn’t resist tweeting: ‘It’s Cardinal Kasper here. Could I cancel that order for champagne tomorrow?’
When Amoris Laetitia came out at noon, there was lamentation from ‘progressive’ Catholic commentators. Christopher Lamb, Vatican correspondent of the Tablet, who instead of reporting had acted as a mouthpiece for Kasperites during last year’s synod, said it looked like Francis wanted to make changes but his bishops wouldn’t let him.
Then the conservatives made a discovery. ‘Footnote 351!’ they yelled. ‘That is where the devil lurks!’
I’d missed it, of course, and so had most of us racing through the exhortation on Thursday night. It refers to the help the Church can give people ‘in an objective situation of sin’ so they can ‘grow in the life of grace and charity’. Since it is already being referred to as ‘the infamous Footnote 351’, I’ll reproduce it in full:
In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, ‘I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy’ (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [24 November 2013], 44: AAS 105 [2013], 1038). I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’ (ibid., 47: 1039).
Those quotation marks and square brackets are significant. They show that Francis is quoting things he’s already said. So no change there. He does, however, juxtapose a reference to confession and one to the Eucharist in such a way that you can infer that the Pope thinks it’s OK for confessors to readmit divorced-and-remarried Catholics to Communion. But you have to read between the lines — or, rather, join two sentences that Francis chose to separate with the word ‘also’.
Step forward the hardline American conservative Michael Brendan Dougherty. He wrote an article entitled ‘The cowardice and hubris of Pope Francis’, which wins my prize for the ‘Go on, tell us what you really think’ headline of the year.
According to the article, Francis ‘strongly encourages the readmission of people in “objectively” adulterous unions to Holy Communion. He doesn’t trumpet this, of course. He buries it in the 351st footnote. For a man showing such great audacity before God, Francis certainly isn’t bold before men.’
Also, Dougherty denounced conservative ‘cowards’ who embraced what was good in the Pope’s ‘ton of verbiage’ but passed over the rest. In fact, it’s easy to ‘pass over’ Francis’s ‘strong encouragement’ of Communion for the divorced-and-remarried — because it isn’t there.
As for the Pope’s ‘cowardice’, we don’t know enough about how the document came to be written to make a judgment. But how odd that the one passage that may hint at what he really wanted to do — relax the ban — is stuffed into a footnote. You could interpret this as sneaky, or an admission of his weakness, or a bit of both.
The official line is that the Pope didn’t want to distract attention from a robust yet sensitive defence of marriage. That’s what you’d hear from Cardinal Vincent Nichols (of whom it’s sometimes said that you’ll never find out what he thinks about anything until he knows he’s risen as high as he’s going to go).
But, as one priest-theologian told me, ‘Let’s be honest, no one actually reads these documents.’
In the end, the chief effect of Amoris Laetitia is to ensure that waters Pope Francis deliberately and foolishly muddied will stay muddy. Since he first raised the subject, divorced-and-remarried Catholics haven’t known where they stand vis-à-vis Communion. Now we know that Francis isn’t going to enlighten them. He has been forced to abort his revolution, if that’s what he was planning.
In the process, he has achieved his aim of making the papacy less intimidating, though not in the way he intended. This week he looks less like a supreme pontiff and more like a prime minister who has failed to get a bill through parliament.
I know a guy who got two annulments like he was ordering a pizza.
they’re not that hard to get. Why not go down that road.
Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace.
Some just choose to ignore it and insist that Francis has not changed anything at all.
I think Damian Thompson needs to actually read the document, because the Pope did indeed devolve everything to the local or regional bishops and the “internal forum” ( meaning your “conscience” and the parish priest can tell you that whatever you want to do is cool) and that cultural and current understandings had to be considered. In other words, there really isn’t any objective morality and while the laws exist, they are merely ideals and suggestions.
So Francis did far worse - he undermined natural law, revealed law and the entire edifice of Christian morality. It’s really a matter of “if it feels good, do it,” and all of life is now just a striving to feel good.
Annulments have certain requirements (especially an existing situation at the time of the marriage) that aren’t easy to meet; when the spouse fights the annulment (as Ted Kennedy’s wife did) then it is even more difficult.
I suspect the divorced/remarried Catholics that want the ban lifted have already gone this route unsuccessfully.
Occurs to me: didn’t the prior pope step down, a rather unusual occurrence? Considering how the current one is racing Left, assorted conspiracy theories cine to mind...
Where’s the part about homosexual unions?
A very good friend of mine got an annulment. He told me if you got the $$$, you basically buy it and it doesn't take years of waiting.
Headline should read: The end of the Catholic Church.
He told me if you got the $$$, you basically buy it and it doesn’t take years of waiting.
___________________________________
Reminds you of our government... No?
God and Gov! Yes they are for sale, always have been, always will be!
It's clear now that there is a deep and profound bitterness within Francis and it's a bitterness which he can not suppress, hence the almost daily outbursts. The bitterness is born of the realization that after half a century of the modernist onslaught, pockets of resistance.....pockets of stiff resistance, still remain.
Everything about Francis, his behavior, his words, his ridicule of those who love the Church and defend its laws, can be encompassed by one essential fact; he refuses to accept Jesus' Scriptural admonition that "the gate is narrow". This is Francis' fundamental non serviam. All his rage, all his outbursts can be explained by this; his desire to widen that gate. Hence, all the talk of "accompaniment", the issue of Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried, the ranting against those who defend fundamental and traditional Catholic Church law.......it's all essentially aimed at uprooting the gateposts and widening the gate.
On the other hand, a "good shepherd" will guide his sheep through that narrow gate or at least attempt to. This is a different model. The Francis shepherd "accompanies" while the sheep wander where they will then rages when they miss the gate to the sheep fold. He berates the "doctors of the law" who guard that gate and attempt to maintain it. The "good shepherd" is a different shepherd entirely.
None of this tortuous and scandalous Synod process was in any way necessary. Which parts of Familiaris Consortio were not clear to these faithless rogues? The whole thing was a transparent shell-game from beginning to end.
251. In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, "as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family". It is unacceptable "that local Churches should be subjected to pressure in this matter and that international bodies should make financial aid to poor countries dependent on the introduction of laws to establish'marriage' between persons of the same sex".278
Notiuce the tagline, a quote from Jorge Bergoglio
If it's a slam-dunk "documentary" case (where a mere document shows that the first marriage was not valid) it could be very quick, whereas if it's a contested annulment which requires tracking down the respondent, translators, cross-examinations, etc. it could be a long time coming, and a favorable ruling is by no means certain.
The pope wasn't willing to compromise with King Henry VIII on this, even though it cost him England and pret-near the whole Anglosphere for the next 500 years.
You wish?
“It is evident that the pastoral practice of the Church cannot stand in opposition to the binding doctrine nor simply ignore it. In the same manner, an architect could perhaps build a most beautiful bridge. However, if he does not pay attention to the laws of structural engineering, he risks the collapse of his construction. In the same manner, every pastoral practice has to follow the Word of God if it does not want to fail. A change of the teaching, of the dogma, is unthinkable. Who nevertheless consciously does it, or insistently demands it, is a heretic – even if he wears the Roman Purple.”
—Cardinal Brandmuller
Brandmuller - AXIOS!
As I understand it, an “immaturity” loophole is used to grant unjustified annulments - as though anyone involved is fooling God...
Bravo
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