BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

I'm one week late posting this item but it's one that must be included in any day-to-day documentation of the 'Bergoglian crisis' (a term I deliberately use in direct analogy to what the Church has always referred to as the 'Arian crisis')...

Dilution of doctrine
by Ross Douthat

Sept. 17, 2016

Last weekend Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and a churchgoing Catholic, briefly escaped obscurity by telling an audience of L.G.B.T. activists that he expects his church to eventually bless and celebrate same-sex marriages.

In short order his bishop, Francis X. DiLorenzo of Richmond, Va., had a statement out declaring that the Catholic understanding of marriage would remain “unchanged and resolute.”

In a normal moment, it would be the task of this conservative Catholic scribbler to explain why the governor is wrong and the bishop is right, why scripture and tradition make it impossible for Catholicism to simply reinvent its sexual ethics.

But this is not a normal moment in the Catholic Church. As the governor was making his prediction, someone leaked a letter from Pope Francis to the Argentine bishops, praising their openness to allowing some divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive communion.

The “private” letter was the latest move in a papal dance that’s been going on since Francis was elected. The pope clearly wants to admit remarried Catholics to communion, and he tried by hook and crook to get the world’s bishops to agree. But he faced intense resistance from conservatives, who pointed out that this reform risked evacuating the church’s teaching that sacramental marriages are indissoluble and second marriages adulterous.

The conservative resistance couldn’t be overcome directly without courting a true crisis. So Francis has proceeded indirectly, offering studied ambiguity in official publications combined with personal suggestions of where he really stands.

This dance has effectively left Catholicism with two teachings on marriage and the sacraments. The traditional rule is inscribed in the church’s magisterium, and no mere papal note can abrogate it.

But to the typical observer, it’s the Francis position that looks more like the church’s real teaching (He is the pope, after all), even if it’s delivered off the cuff or in footnotes or through surrogates.

That position, more or less, seems to be that second marriages may be technically adulterous, but it’s unreasonable to expect modern people to realize that, and even more unreasonable to expect them to leave those marriages or practice celibacy within them. So the sin involved in a second marriage is often venial not mortal, and not serious enough to justify excluding people of good intentions from the sacraments.

Which brings us back to Tim Kaine’s vision, because it is very easy to apply this modified position on remarriage to same-sex unions. [But from JMB/PF's entire record as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and as pope, the obvious next beneficiaries of formal sacramental leniency from this pope are practising homosexuals, along with unmarried cohabitators. The only question is how he will formally grant this concession - can you see him calling a synod to discuss homosexuals and their lifestyle?]


If relationships the church once condemned as adultery are no longer a major, soul-threatening sin, then why should a committed same-sex relationship be any different? If the church makes post-sexual revolution allowances for straight couples, shouldn’t it make the same ones for people who aren’t even attracted to the opposite sex?

An allowance is not the same thing as a blessing. Under the Francis approach, the church would not celebrate second marriages, and were its logic extended to gay couples there wouldn’t be the kind of active celebration Kaine envisions either.

Instead, the church would keep the traditional teaching on its books, and only marry couples who fit the traditional criteria. But it would also signal approval to any stable relationship (gay or straight, married or cohabiting), treating the letter of the law like the pirate’s code in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies: More what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.

The cleverness of this compromise, in theory, is that it leaves conservative Catholics with that letter to cling to, and with it the belief that the church’s teaching is supernaturally guaranteed. Thus there is no crisis point, and less risk of imitating Anglicanism’s recent schisms.

In the short run this may indeed be clever. (Clearly, conservative bishops have no idea how to handle Francis’s maneuvers.) But how long will liberal Catholics be content with a settlement that still leaves same-sex relationships in a merely-tolerated limbo, and that leaves open the possibility that a new pope — an African conservative, let’s say — might reassert the letter of the law and undo Franciss’ work?

How long can conservative Catholics persist in waiting for such a pope, and in telling one another — as they’ve been doing, rather miserably, of late — to obey the church of 2,000 years rather than the current pontiff?

And how effectively can a church retain the lukewarm or uncertain if it keeps its most controversial teachings while constantly winking to say, “Don’t worry, we don’t actually believe all that?”

This instability makes it unlikely that Pope Francis will be remembered as a great conciliator or unifier. It’s more likely now that his legacy will be either famous or infamous.

If liberal Catholics have read providence’s intentions rightly, he will be the patron saint of all future reformers.

If not, he will join a group even more select than the communion of saints: The list of popes who came close — too close — to teaching something other than the Catholic faith.

Layman Ross Douthat is far more direct and forthright about the objective situation caused in the Church by AL, JMB's most quintessentially divisive action in the Church so far, and one that was obviously long premeditated and then manipulated openly over two years to take on his position on sacramental leniency, and failing that, to force through his position nonetheless, albeit clothed casuistically and ambiguously.

And so I disagree with Fr. Mark Drew of the Catholic Herald, who refers to a tug of war, when what we have is a grossly asymmetrical confrontation in which the pope (Goliath) holds all the authority cards and all the concrete power residing in the Church hierarchy and infrastructure, against a ragtag, virtually leaderless minority (David) whose only strengths are abstract (truth, the faith, orthodoxy) expressible only in words bound to be lost like flotsam and jetsam in the ocean of public consensus reflecting the dominant secular mentality.

The cartoon and the title are both misnamed. The fight is not about AL in particular, because the Catholic minority so passionately opposed to its worst provisions certainly want no part of the document - Bergoglio and his myrmidons can have full possession of it.



Tug of war over Amoris
Catholics are divided over how far Francis wants to change Church teaching
regarding the remarried. But does he even have the authority to do so?

by Fr Mark Drew

Thursday, 22 Sep 2016

When Pope Francis published Amoris Laetitia five months ago, I predicted that the discussion of the document and its implications for Catholic teaching on marriage and the family would be lively and sometimes acrimonious. So it has turned out. [No prediction was needed. It was a foregone conclusion considering the almost three years of papal and Vatican theatricals that had one clear end in mind: extend Jorge Bergoglio's 'communion for everyone' unwritten law in Buenos Aires to the universal Church via papal writ, with, if possible, the backing of not just one but two bishops' synodal assemblies.]

The debate took a fresh turn last week with the publication of theoretically private correspondence between the Pope and the bishops of his native Argentina concerning the interpretation of a central point.

Before looking at the contents of the leaked letters, it may be useful to refresh our memories about Amoris Laetitia and why it is controversial. Vatican documents rarely hold the public’s attention for long – though the number of impassioned pundits seems to have increased during the current papacy.

Early in his pontificate Pope Francis made clear that he wanted the Synod of Bishops – a worldwide body which since Vatican II has met periodically to discuss topical issues – to discuss the place of the family in the world today and its repercussions for the Church. As a sign of the importance of the issue, the debate would take place over two synods in successive years. [That's quite a bit of revisionism of recent history there, Fr. Drew, considering that the first mention JMB ever made of a synod on 'the family' was in response to a question as to what he intended to do about the communion ban for remarried divorcees - which I think was a planted question so he could give the answer he did. Especially since no one thought to ask him "What's to discuss about this when John Paul II already reaffirmed the communion ban very clearly and explicitly in Familiaris consortio?" Well, his handpicked tactician-executor of synodal maneuvers, Cardinal Baldisseri, was to tell us a few months later, when the first synod was first announced (there was only going to be one, an extraordinary synod, but then, what the heck! throw in an ordinary synod as well the following year), that FC was 33 years too old and had to be updated. Code words for "That communion ban has to go", never mind that it was reaffirmed by a saint this current pope had recently canonized!]

It is usual for each synod to be followed by the publication of a “post-synodal exhortation” where the Pope sums up the bishops’ findings and adds reflections of his own. Amoris Laetitia, the exhortation following these two synods, was the longest papal document in history, reflecting the complexity of the issues involved and the Church’s desire to shed light on the crisis confronting the modern family. [That's BS, Fr. Drew. What new complexities does AL describe that were not already present in FC? AL is lengthy because JMB and his ghosts decided they would dress up their key points written in Chapter 8 with a whole lot of orthodox froufrou reaffirming all that is universally accepted about the Church teaching to dissimulate the doctrinal and sacramental time bombs they sewed into the fabric of the document. And they did succeed in some way because even some of the harshest critics of AL were forced to acknowledge that outside of Chapter 8, much of it was comme il faut, some of it even said to be 'poetically written'.

But who cares about a seemingly lovely confection when it masks the poison it carries in Chapter 8? AL is knowingly and deliberately poisoned in what it implies about profaning the sacraments of matrimony, penance and the Eucharist, and about the nature of sin and the state of grace one needs to receive the Eucharist. Not to forget poisoned droplets outside Chapter 8, such as the whole bit about entrusting sex education of children to schools and other institutions, completely bypassing parental responsibility.]

But the issue which grabbed most attention was the possibility that Pope Francis might change the discipline on Communion for the divorced and remarried. The Pope had given strong hints from the first months of his pontificate that he wished to relax the traditional discipline, which regards marriages contracted by Catholics after divorce and without annulment of the first marriage as adulterous, constituting a bar to reception of the Eucharist.

The synod debates proved inconclusive. There was fierce opposition from many bishops to any relaxing of the discipline, which had been reaffirmed energetically by Pope St John Paul II. In the end, a compromise formula was found, which spoke of re-integrating these Catholics into the full life of the Church under the guidance of clergy but did not specify whether this included Communion. [The compromise was inexplicably and unforgivably cowardly on the part of the orthodox synodal fathers. By agreeing to omit in their final document the three lines in FC 84 in which St. John Paul II reaffirmed the communion ban, they effectively capitulated to Bergoglio, giving him the pretext not to refer to those lines at all and therefore, avoiding the appearance of directly contradicting John Paul II (and Benedict XVI who reiterated the Communion ban in Sacramentum caritatis). Has Edward Pentin or any other resourceful Vaticanista not tried to find the arriere-scene for that flagrant omission???]
All eyes were on Francis. Would he fling open the door which his favoured theologians had managed to prise ajar?

When the Pope’s document came, it seemed to steer clear of giving an unambiguous answer to the question which by now had eclipsed the wider issues treated at such length in AL. But two footnotes in the most controversial section, Chapter 8, seemed like a nudge and a wink to those determined to overthrow traditional doctrine in the name of pastoral openness. They stressed that subjective factors may diminish the guilt of objectively sinful situations and affirmed that in some cases the Church could offer those involved the help of the sacraments.

The ambiguity seemed deliberate – and indeed, the Pope had declared near the beginning of the document that the Church’s Magisterium could not be expected to settle every controverted question.

A debate developed along predictable lines. Conservative pastors and theologians maintained that the Pope was not changing Catholic doctrine. Others hailed a development of practice, setting aside the letter of the law in order to offer sinners the mercy which is, for Francis, the very essence of the Gospel.

The correspondence with the Argentine bishops seems to settle the argument decisively in favour of those who believe that AL liberalises the practice, if not the doctrine.

The bishops sent a draft document to the Pope for comment. It said that a process of discernment with pastors might recognise factors that limit the culpability of divorced and remarried spouses who found themselves incapable of sexual abstinence.

For such people, they wrote, “Amoris Laetitia opens the possibility of access to the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist.” The Pope responded that “The document … completely explains the meaning of Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations.”

In a sequence of events we have become accustomed to under Pope Francis, the document was leaked, then after a few days confirmed as authentic by the Vatican. From now on, it seems clear that the Pope intends to legitimise a practice which is not only without official precedent, but was also ruled out by a predecessor he himself has canonised. St John Paul II’s 1981 post-synodal exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, unambiguously makes continence a pre-condition for the civilly remarried seeking access to the Eucharist.

The papal intervention presents a twofold difficulty for Catholics who take seriously the teaching authority of the Church, and of the Pope as the chief depository of that authority.

First, it is difficult not to see a contradiction between Francis’s view and the previous teaching, not just of one pope but of his predecessors as a whole.

This leads us to the second problem, which is even more serious because it goes beyond any one teaching and touches upon the nature and scope of papal authority in itself.

Much has been written about the difficulties of harmonising AL with previous teaching. The indissolubility of marriage is a dogma which Francis has no wish to set aside. But its practical consequences are the inadmissibility of subsequent unions while a first spouse still lives. The prohibition on receiving the Eucharist in a state of grave sin, and the necessity of a purpose of amendment for absolution, are equally firm articles of the Catholic faith. Does the Pope’s implicit relaxation of the discipline not set these aside?

Concern has been so deep and widespread that a group of Catholic academic theologians, along with some pastors of souls, many of them based in Britain, have gone so far as to write to the College of Cardinals.

Once more, a letter meant to be private has been made public, and this has created sufficient concern in the hierarchy to lead to some of the signatories of the letter being subjected to pressure from their superiors to distance themselves from its contents. The authors have been careful to point out that they are not saying that Pope Francis is a heretic, but are asking for an official clarification and a rectification of errors. [Fine, you don't have to go so far as to make a technical accusation of 'heresy'. All you have to say is that this pope has made, makes and will continue to make statements that cannot be harmonized with Catholic teaching before him, and are therefore simply wrong. Asking him to rectify his errors is saying he has made errors.]

Most Catholics will be puzzled, and possibly outraged, at the notion that a pope might be suspected of teaching error. [More simply, these are the Catholics who have been brought up to believe that 'the pope is always right' - even if in practice they apply this selectively. The popes - and the Church - cannot be right about contraception and abortion, so let's ignore them on this. But if this pope tells us we can receive communion as we please because we can discern ourselves that we are not really sinning and/or that we are in a special state of grace even without going to confession, then oh yes, indeed, the pope is soooo right!]

Pious repugnance at the very notion may lie behind the discreet episcopal attempts to silence the critics, which is otherwise hard to understand when the Pope himself has called for parrhesia, or courageous frankness, in discussing the issues.

Some knowledge of history and doctrine is necessary to enable us to look at the situation calmly. Catholics believe that the Pope is divinely preserved from error – that he is infallible – only in very specific circumstances. He must, whether presiding over a General Council or acting on his own authority, make it clear that he intends to deliver a teaching that will bind the conscience of the faithful and is irrevocable.

In modern times, only the teachings on the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950 have been proclaimed in this manner, and Francis has made it clear that he is not establishing binding norms – on the contrary, he has said that he wishes to provoke debate. [But his duty as pope is to unify the Church, not to deliberately provoke divisions. Not that he has ever manifested much of this unifying initiative, unless it is with non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians in general.]

The rest of the time the Pope, and the bishops in union with him, are exercising what we call the Ordinary Magisterium. It is divinely preserved from error only when it is constant and unanimous. John Paul II affirmed that the impossibility of women’s ordination, for example, is an example of this type of infallible teaching. [Constant it has been, but no longer unanimous! Watch this pope provoke new divisions over his apparent readiness to open the door to women priests by seemingly encouraging the notion of ordaining women deacons.]

Sometimes a teaching is not derived from unanimous tradition, but arises as a response to a contingent situation. Vatican II said that we must accord the teachings of the Ordinary Magisterium a “religious assent of mind and will”. This is not the same as the assent of faith, but is essentially loyal obedience to the Church’s authority.

So what happens if there appears to be a contradiction in the teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium? Essentially there are three possibilities.

The first is that Pope Francis is right and his predecessors were wrong. The difficulty is that he is one and they are many – and an oft-repeated teaching carries more authority than one issued by only one pope, and in a less solemn form.

The second is that Pope Francis is in error. It may happen that a pope errs in a non-infallible teaching, and he himself or his successor subsequently corrects it. In the 14th century, for example, John XXII taught a doctrine on the destiny of souls after death which he later recanted and which was judged heretical by his successor.

The third possibility is that the contradiction is only apparent and that there has been a development of doctrine which opens up new possibilities without repudiating what has been taught previously. This is the answer favoured by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, seemingly Pope Francis’s preferred spokesman on this issue.

The problem is that, according to the great exponent of the principle of development, our own Blessed John Henry Newman, development is only authentic if it preserves what has gone before and does not contradict it. Cardinal Schönborn has affirmed that this is the case for AL, but I am not convinced that he has demonstrated it with compelling argument. [What compelling argument can be presented to show that AL does not contradict Catholic teaching as we have known it till March 13, 2013?]

The First Vatican Council taught that “the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might … make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the Apostles.”

The controversy surrounding AL has made it clear that there is work to be done in showing how its teaching may be squared with that of previous popes [Nothing can be done to prove an impossibility! When the pope through AL empowers individual bishops, bishops' conferences, priests - and the very sinners themselves - to 'discern' whether or not they are worthy to receive Communion, without the assurances demanded of other sinners at confession ('to do penance and to amend my life'), that has surely never been taught by any pope before this one. And pace Cardinal Schoenborn, this Bergoglian twist is no 'development of doctrine' - it is a dismissal of specific doctrines to be replaced by new teaching that belongs to the church of Bergoglio, but certainly not to the Catholic Church].

Pope Francis often appears impatient with theological debate and even uninterested in setting out a coherent intellectual account of the orthodoxy which must undergird orthopraxis (correct conduct). The Church as a whole, however, cannot long do without such an account if her claims to teach authoritatively are to possess any real credibility.

The prerequisite for achieving that goal is an intellectually honest recognition of the difficulties in the current exercise of the papal Magisterium and an evenhanded recognition of the right to question and debate. [Canon 212 assures us of this right, and may the tribe increase in size and power of those who are committed to exercise this right actively day in and day out during a pontificate I would describe as amoeban - it takes on whatever shape the pope wants it to take at any moment. The Successor of Peter as an amoeba. Certainly no rock!]