Magisterial??
December 7, 2017
So PF's letter to a bishop in Argentina has been published in the AAS. Naturally, people are worried about the status which this might confer on it. Does it turn the letter concerned into a Magisterial document to which we are obliged to exhibit respect (
obsequium)? And all that.
I am not going to get into questions such as the different weight to be accorded to different levels of papal documents; or how to construe a papal document which either obviously or apparently contradicts another document of the same Magisterial level. You can find that sort of stuff elsewhere.
And the great Father Zed has done the Church Militant another immense service by printing a detailed analysis of the situation by a noted canonist.
[See article below.] The gist is:
even an Apostolic Letter printed in AAS does not cancel Canon 915 (unless it explicitly and in due form says that it does).
We are in a new situation under PF, and new hermeneutical methods are both needed and implied. I offer some thoughts ... you might call them the tentative reactions of a Plain Simple Man.
It is an objective and undeniable fact that Amoris laetitia has been interpreted in diametrically contradictory ways.
- Some bishops, some conferences, take the view that it has changed nothing of the teaching contained in previous Magisterial documents. - Some bishops, some conferences, believe that it has opened up the possibility of giving the Sacraments to unrepentant public adulterers.
A sound and common sense principle is:
"A doubtful Law is no Law". As Cardinal Mueller has pointed out, in a very grave matter a change can only be made in law or doctrine by an explicit statement, with accompanying reasoning, making clear beyond all doubt that a change is being made. Sending Von Schoenborn down to a Vatican News Conference to smile sweetly at Diane Montagna and say "It's a Development!! Read Newman!!!" hardly meets this criterion.
If Amoris laetitia itself is of no effect, clearly a letter (even if it subsequently appropriates to itself the grandiose term 'Magisterial') which purports to interpret AL, can hardly rise much above the level of
nugacitas (trifling play).
Vatican I defined that
ex cathedra statements of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable ex sese (in themselves) and do not depend
ex consensu Ecclesiae (on the consensus of the Church]. By implication:
it has not been defined that lesser papal statements are ex sese irreformable. Thus, we can take into account what conferences and individual bishops say in interpreting Amoris laetitia
[and AL itself, without having to be bound by it].
That document is reformable and any force it may eventually after a few decades acquire will depend on the consensus of the Church. A fortiori, the same is true of the note that Cardinal Parolin has so unwisely attached to the text of "the Argentine letter" in AAS.
One of the cheapest and nastiest tricks of the current regime is its facile habit of plastering labels reading "Holy Spirit" or "Magisterium" onto any ill-considered novelty it wants to force down the throats of its unwilling fellow Christians.
Another objective and undeniable fact: although instructed by his Employer to "strengthen your brethren", PF has not replied to Dubia, even when submitted by
patres purpurati.
Quite obviously, it cannot be argued that he has taught, clearly, explicitly, and as definitive tenendum, any of those contents of the document Amoris laetitia which have caused such puzzlement.
In other words,
the Petrine Ministry appears currently to be in the state which Blessed John Henry Newman neatly described as Suspense. I suggest that a general pastoral conclusion to be drawn from all this is that ordinary straightforward Christians have better things to do with their time than worrying about the precise status of ambiguous statements.
Better, richer, more God-given things. Qualia essent ...
Open a bottle of wine.
Compose a limerick in English about Cardinal Kasper.
Do the Times Latin Crossword in under five minutes.
Play forfeits with your wife/husband.
Incorporate into a 'Vergilian' eclogue (with goats and shepherdesses galore) Cardinal Mueller's recent brilliant apercu that the Church is not a Field Hospital but a Silicon Valley.
Recite the Quicunque vult and make an Act of Faith.
Cram yourself full of baklava and/or halva.
Listen to the Kyries of the Missa Papae Marcelli.
Go to Ashmole and commune with Menander or Benedict XIV or both.
Walk down the river from Sandford Lock to Abingdon and count the species of waterfowl.
Convert the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis into Homeric hexameters.
Shoot a magpie or two or three or four.
Find a priest who will take a stipend to offer the Mass Salus populi for the Ecclesia Dei adflicta.
This is canonist Ed Peters's take on the Bergoglian promulgation by rescript:
On the appearance of the pope’s letter
to the Argentine bishops in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis
December 4, 2017
Some three months ago I predicted that Pope Francis’s letter to the Argentine bishops, approving their implementation of Amoris laetitia, would make its way into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Now it has.
An accompanying note from Cardinal Parolin states that the pope wishes the Argentine document to enjoy “magisterial authority” and that his endorsement thereof has the status of an “apostolic letter”.
Fine. Let’s work through some points.
1.
Canon 915. It is crucial to understand that, today, what actually prevents ministers of holy Communion from distributing the Eucharist to divorced-and-remarried Catholics is Canon 915 and the universal, unanimous interpretation which that legislative text, rooted as it is in divine law, has always received.
Canon 915 and the fundamental sacramental and moral values behind it might be forgotten, ignored, or ridiculed, even by ranking officers in the Church, but
unless and until that law is revoked or modified by papal legislative action or is effectively neutered by pontifically approved “authentic interpretation” (1983 CIC 16),
Canon 915 stands and, so standing, binds ministers of holy Communion.
Neither the pope’s letter to the Argentines, nor the Argentine bishops’ document, nor even Amoris laetitia so much as mentions Canon 915, let alone do these documents abrogate, obrogate, or authentically interpret this norm out of the Code of Canon Law. Granted, little or nothing in these documents endorses or reiterates Canon 915, either, and the apparently studied silence that Canon 915 suffers these days is cause for deep pastoral concern. But
law does not wilt under the silent treatment.
2.
Apostolic letter. An “apostolic letter” is a sort of mini-encyclical and, however much attention encyclicals get for their teaching or exhortational value, they are not (with rare exceptions) legislative texts used to formulate new legal norms.
Typically “apostolic letters” are written to smaller groups within the Church and deal with more limited questions—not world-wide questions such as admitting divorced-and-remarried Catholics to holy Communion. Even where a special kind of “apostolic letter” is used to make changes to the law — such as John Paul II did in Ad tuendam fidem (1998), as Benedict did in Omnium in mentem (2009), or as Francis did in Magnum principium (2017) — the “apostolic letter” used in such cases carries the additional designation “motu proprio” (i.e., on the pope’s own initiative, and not in response to another’s action), and the changes made to the law thereby are expressly identified by canon number, not simply implied or surmised, especially not by silence.
The pope’s letter to the Argentines appears simply as an “apostolic letter”, not as an “apostolic letter motu proprio”, and it references no canons.
3.
Authentic magisterium. Many people use the term “magisterium” as if it were tantamount to “Church governing authority”, but in its canonical sense
“magisterium” generally refers to the Church’s authority to issue teachings on faith and morals, not to the Church’s authority to enforce discipline related to matters of faith and morals.
While Francis — albeit about as indirectly as is possible (through a memo to a dicastery official concerning a letter written by an episcopal conference) — has indicated that his letter to the Argentines and even the Argentine conference letter itself are “magisterial”, the fact remains that
the content of any Church document, in order to bear most properly the label “magisterial”, must deal with assertions about faith and morals, not provisions for disciplinary issues related to faith and morals.
Church documents can have both “magisterial” and “disciplinary” passages, of course, but generally only those teaching parts of such a document are canonically considered “magisterial” while normative parts of such a document are canonically considered “disciplinary”.
Francis has, in my opinion, too loosely designated others of his views as bearing “magisterial authority” (recall his comments about the liturgical movement), and he is not alone in making, from time to time, odd comments about the use of papal power (recall John Paul II invoking “the fullness of [his] Apostolic authority” to update the by-laws of a pontifical think-tank in 1999).
But that inconsistent usage only underscores that the rest of us must try to read such documents in accord with how the Church herself usually (I wish always, but I’ll content myself with “usually”) writes them, and ask, here:
Are there “magisterial” assertions in Amoris, the Buenos Aires document, and Francis’ endorsement letter? Yes. Plenty, running the gamut from obviously true, through true-but-oddly-or-incompletely phrased, to a few that, while capable of being understood in an orthodox sense, are formulated in ways that lend themselves to heterodox understandings (and for that reason should be clarified for the sake of the common ecclesial good).
In any case, such teaching statements, to the extent they make assertions about faith or morals and come from bishops and/or popes acting as bishops or popes, already enjoy thereby at least some (relatively little) level of ordinary magisterial value, a value not augmented by sticking the label “magisterial” on them.
And, are there “disciplinary” assertions in Amoris, the Buenos Aires document, and Francis’ endorsement letter? Yes, a few. But as I have said before, in my view,
none of those rather few disciplinary assertions, even those ambiguous and capable therefore of leaving the door open to unacceptable practices, suffices to revoke, modify, or otherwise obviate Canon 915 which, as noted above, prevents the administration of holy Communion to divorced-and-remarried Catholics.
Conclusion
- I wish that Canon 915 were not the sole bulwark against the abandonment of the Eucharist to the vagaries of individual, often malformed, consciences.
- I wish that a lively, pastorally-driven sense of the liberating permanence of Christian marriage, the universal need for Confession to reconcile those in grave sin, the power of the Eucharist to feed souls in the state of grace and to condemn those who receive irreverently, sufficed to make invocation of Canon 915 unnecessary in pastoral practice.
But apparently, in much of the Catholic world these days, such is not the case, and Canon 915 must be pointed to as if it were the only reason to bar reception of holy Communion in these situations.
But what can one say?
Unless Canon 915 itself is directly revoked, gutted, or neutered, it binds ministers of holy Communion to withhold that most august sacrament from, among others, divorced-and-remarried Catholics except where such couples live as brother-sister and without scandal to the community.
Nothing I have seen to date, including the appearance of the pope’s and Argentine bishops’ letters in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, makes me think that Canon 915 has suffered such a fate.
In short, Canon 915 is still the law of the Church, regardless of what AL, the pope, Cardinals Schoenborn and Marx, the bishops of Malta, etc. about allowable exceptions. But how does that spiritually help - the persons who think themselves to be among these exceptions (and the priests whose discernment makes them agree with the self-absolved exceptions, none of whom will ever so much as remember Canon 915) and now feel free to flout Canon 915? We're talking practical consequences here, having to do with a false absolution from sin and a false state of grace leading to sacrilegious communion and a self-satisfied persistence in adulterous living. None of this will be avoided by citing Canon 915 to protest all that.