I am still waiting for an official logo or banner of the HYOM that will show, not Pope Francis front and center, but perhaps the famous image of Divine Mercy that St. Faustina left us.
Rules, Pope Francis,
and the Year of Mercy
By David G Bonagura, Jr.
April 15, 2015
Rules have a very important function in life, and that’s no less true in the life of the Church. Rules provide direction for proper living – what to do and what to avoid – so that we may flourish. A man placed in a junkyard with the single order to build a car would likely fare much better with a set of instructions than if he were left to his own devices.
In this sense, rules, even though they carry certain restrictions – the steering wheel must connect to the axle, not the gas tank – can be liberating, because they are proven ways that aid our pursuit of what is good and true.
Some Catholics like rules, both those given by God and those made by the Church, because they know the rules lead to God. Rules, both negative (the prohibitions) and positive (the commandment to love one another), show us how to live and provide certainty in times of unrest.
Such Catholics, rightly called “conservative” because they desire God’s laws to be conserved, have felt some dissatisfaction with the way some rules have been downplayed, or even undermined, since Vatican II by “liberal” Catholics, clergy and lay alike, who perceive rules as obstacles to an ideal faith life.
Into this broader cultural and theological disparity between conservative and liberal, the pontificate of Pope Francis has been thrust. The media’s caricature of “Francis the Reformer” is now well established.
[not a caricature, which only has negative connotations - and the media image of JMB/PF certainly has no negative connotations so far, but rather, a golden myth of the can-do-anything, personally infallible, absolutely irreproachable superman who happens to be Pope today]. Yet it also has to be said that some of the pontiff’s own comments and actions have fueled this perception
[Perception of what: A 'reformer' - which he most certainly means to be; or a radical revolutionary, as his most ardent fans like Cardinal Kasper think he is.]
And to this plot Francis has added a new twist: the calling of a rarely seen extraordinary Jubilee, a Holy Year of Mercy, to be celebrated in the Church. The pope hopes that “the whole Church will find in this Jubilee the joy needed to rediscover and make fruitful the mercy of God, with which all of us are called to give consolation to every man and woman of our time.”
Mercy has been at the center of Francis’s priestly life
[Yes, but which mercy: divine mercy, as we Catholics have always been taught it is, or 'pastoral mercy' which seems to be what JMB/PF refers to most of the time, although he makes it appear that the pastoral mercy he advocates is a manifestation of divine mercy in what he considers to be the right and only interpretation (his own, and that of his favorite thelogians Fernandez and Kasper) of divine mercy].
Rules and structures do not seem to have been nearly as high a priority.
With the approach of another Synod this fall, at which a particular set of rules – the pastoral care of the divorced and civilly remarried – are to be discussed just before the Year of Mercy begins, it is fair to wonder if Francis will change these rules, considering the change as an act of mercy.
[Unless JMB/PF has been cleverly playing a most devious game of indirection - in that all his signals, words and actions so far, up to and including proclaiming a Year of Mercy, all unmistakably seem to be setting the stage for universalizing the pastoral largesse he manifested as Archbishop of Buenos Aires - then yes, we shall be presented with any changes to the sacramental discipline of the Church with regard to Matrimony, Penance and the Eucharist as 'acts of mercy'. Or, miracle of miracles, he will reject any such pastoral leniency as incompatible with what Christ himself taught. A consummation devoutly to be prayed for!]
But just as interpreting Francis’s pontificate falls within a broader narrative,
a deeper question underlies the manner in which the coming Synod has been cast. Is mercy antithetical to rules?
When asked this question nearly 800 years ago, St. Thomas Aquinas saw no conflict between them: “A person is said to be merciful” when he is “affected with sorrow at the misery of another as though it were his own. Hence it follows that he endeavors to dispel the misery of this other, as if it were his.”
Dispelling another’s misery neither requires rules to be rewritten, nor undermines what is just to another. St. Thomas describes how both God and man act mercifully in this regard: “God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a man who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing him only one hundred, does nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against him, for in remitting it he may be said to bestow a gift.”
Thomas thus concludes that
“mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fullness thereof.” To be merciful to another, then, is not a matter of changing the rules so that the miserable one now stands in a new set of circumstances. It is rather to suffuse the miserable one with love and compassion to alleviate the misery in which he finds himself.
The redemption of humanity, triumphantly celebrated at Easter, is the model par excellence of the harmony of rules and mercy. God, in an act of mercy, sent his Son into the world to redeem human beings languishing in the misery of sin.
The Son, though he could have saved mankind in an infinite number of ways, consented to a torturous death because the Father’s own rules demanded that blood was required to expiate sin. As the author of the universe and all rules, God could have changed his own rules to spare his Son.
But
instead of changing the rules, God showed us true mercy. The Son descended to our misery, not to take us out of it, but to help us be sanctified within it. And with his grace the misery of our hearts is dispelled, even if the miserable condition in which we live remains the same.
Some Biblical scholarship has depicted Jesus as a modern liberal who battled the rigid, conservative Pharisees’ strict adherence to the law. But
Jesus did not overturn a single law, and, in the field where rules are most contested today – sex – he even made the rules stricter. Rather, Jesus challenged the Pharisees to love and heed “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” (Mt 23:23)
Jesus’s exhortation is a fine model for the coming Synod on the family and the Year of Mercy: not new rules, but the same rules applied with justice, mercy, and faith.
David Bonagura is a lecturer at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, NY.
Apropos, Father Z had a brief post yesterday on the Bergoglian family synods and what seems to be a rather alarming statement from one of JMB/PF's chief surrogates::
Card. Maradiaga: Ongoing synodal process
until desired result is obtained?
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
April 15, 2015
At the Italian site Nuova Bussola, we find the observations of Oscar Card. Rodriguez Maradiaga about the possibility of Communion for the divorced and remarried.
Impossible? “No!”, says the Cardinal.
And if the upcoming Synod rejects the proposal, the Kasperite Solution, hey!… maybe there could be a third synod on the question!
And His Eminence seems to be putting a great deal of stock in polls.
So I followed Fr. Z's link to Nuova Bussola - which has a subsite all about the Bergoglian family synods - to find that they picked up the information from INFOVATICANA of Madrid. From which I got the following first-hand information:
Cardinal Maradiaga: For the Pope,
the most important problem today
is the shortage of families
Translated from
April 11, 2015
Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga Rodriguez was in Madrid last week to take part in meetings at the Instituto Teologica de Vida Religiosa, at the end of which he spoke to a limited number of newsmen, of which the INFOVATICANA correspondent was one.
[What follows is a transcript - it seems edited and trucnated to me - of Maradiaga's answers to a number of questions, some of which may perhaps deserve translation and posting later, but he gave the most interesting and intriguing answer to the question that had to do with the Bergoglian family synods.][
What steps do you think may be taken regarding pastoral practice in dealing with extraordinary and irreversible situations?
The synodal assembly in October 2014 was the first, following the method of ‘see, judge, and act’. That was to ‘see’, now we must judge. [But I thought the line is: "Who am I to judge?", or "Who are we to judge?"! What a rash and typically half-baked remark that was from JMB/PF, as if he and all of us are not always judging facts and opinions, which we are all entitled to do, and although only God can ultimately judge any man, even courts judge men who are brought to trial!]
That is why the theological problems that have been raised have been referred to theological commissions [REALLY??? Does Cardinal Mueller know about this?], and later, in the questionnaires that were sent out [to all diocesan bishops] which are of great importance in seeing what it is that must be acted on.
We do not know if the end of the October 2015 synodal assembly will close the process, or if the Pope may call a third synod – which he could do – because these are very important matters.
More importantly, from the Pope’s perspective, this is the most important problem in the Church and in the world today: the shortage of families. Because all the surveys (results of the pre-synodal questionnaires) everywhere indicated that today, in general, people do not want to get married – neither in the church nor civilly - yet the gospel of the family must be proclaimed because it is God’s plan, and therefore, it must also be for the Church.
It’s not just what is being said that remarried divorcees will be allowed to receive communion – no, there are more profound things than that which the synodal assemblies must deal with.
The cardinal was apparently not asked a follow-up question, but his answer echoes what JMB/PF told La Nacion in an interview last December: that what he wants to do for remarried divorcees goes beyond just allowing them to receive communion but to fully integrate them into the life of the Church.
Which implies that they have been shut off from the life of the Church, which I don't think is the situation with most remarried divorcees who still consider themselves observant Catholics, since
1) divorce and remarriage are such routine events now in Western societies that remarried divorcees are not considered anything out of the ordinary, much less stigmatized; and
2) these observant remarried divorcees probably have been receiving communion all along from priests who really do not care or know about their marital status, and/or who believe in 'communion for everyone' who comes to Mass, which has become a widespread practice after the Vatican II liturgical reform.
So this idea of 'integrating' RCDs in the life of the Church is yet another 'pretext' to manifest pastoral leniency (already very much in practice anyway) in the guise of mercy. Because such pastoral leniency is already very widespread, what was the urgency then to have synodal assemblies act on this issue?
As I have always maintained, it is because JMB/PF wants the bishops of the world - through the synodal assemblies - to formalize his pet notion of 'communion for everyone' (not just RCDs, but practising homosexuals and unmarried cohabiting couples, and anyone who presents for communion without having gone to confession or being otherwise in the requisite 'state of grace' to receive the Lord's Body and Blood). With the 'approval' of the synodal assembly, he can then go ahead and legislate it for the universal Church, so that general Eucharistic leniency is no longer just the arbitrary unilateral action of a local priest or bishop, as it was his when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
A second point I would have raised with Cardinal Maradiaga is that if JMB/PF is so concerned with the shortage of families - or more precisely, with less and less persons wanting to get married - why then does he appear to be encouraging common-law unions and homosexual unions as having 'something positive', in the words of the pre-amendment synodal Relatio in October 2014, and even justifying common-law unions as often financially motivated (as he did in Buenos Aires) which is a strange non-argument. Because unless the couple does not intend to have children at all, how is it any more expensive to live together unmarried than to live together properly married?
Or is it that I have completely misunderstood (and perhaps misrepresented) all of JMB/PF's past actions and statements on these issues?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/04/2015 04:16]