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Not having posted anything from Maureen Mullarkey in some time, I find the following commentary spot-on and characteristically original..
On Amoris Laetitia & the ‘Filial Correction’
October 10, 2017
Heresy-spotting is not my forte. I have no inclination or talent for it. But the word hangs heavy in the air these days. It is impossible to ignore it. Ballots went out as soon as Amoris Laetitia hit the stands: “Does the apostolic exhortation propagate heresy? Check the box marked Yes or No. Either way, might any other words, deeds, or omissions by the Supreme Pontiff constitute encouragement of heresy? Again, check the box marked Yes or No.”
The alternatives have been dueling for two years. There is no need to detail here the moves in this formalized combat beyond a brief reprise. You know what they are. First came the widely circulated DUBIA which Francis disdained to answer. His stonewall prompted a public “filial correction” by Catholic clergy and scholars. The press seized on it, intrigued by the newsworthy gap between the 14th century contest with Pope John XXII and today’s bout with Francis the Good.
In turn, the Correctio Filialis prompted a counter correction. “Its own dubia,” Sandro Magister called it. The contest is a bloodless, ecclesial variant of England’s old conflict between Royalists and Roundheads.The absolutist temper of a monarchial papacy, in which all authority flows downward from the Chair of Peter, is a cherished model among conservative Catholics. [???] Yet it is conservatives who are now closer to the Roundhead position in spite of themselves. (The Roundheads opposed the divine right of kings, insisting that the English monarch could not govern without parliamentary consent.)
Charles I lost that battle, and his head along with it. But Francis I is not Charles. To date, the royalist party has been in the saddle. But is that momentum beginning to reverse? Joseph Shaw, one of the original signatories to the filial correction, thinks so. He wrote recently on Rorate-Cæli:
“… that position, or refusing to clarify, is crumbling now. We have now had two Cardinals, Müller and the Secretary of State, Cardinal Parolin, calling for a serious engagement between the Vatican and critics such as the signatories and the DUBIA Cardinals. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are approaching the end game.”
[Strange optimism, with all due respect for Mr. Shaw. Might not Bergoglio have looked on the recent deaths of two of the four DUBIA cardinals (within a year of their ill-fated letter) as a ‘God-given’ sign that it is he who is in the right? Regardless, he is relentlessly single-minded in pushing his agenda through in what he typically thinks will be an irreversible way.]
We can hope so. Though it remains uncertain how much comfort there will be in the outcome of this match.
Roberto de Mattei, writing from Rome in early 2015, published in Rorate Cæli an essay that resonates just now. “A Pope Who Fell Into Heresy; A Church that Resisted” summarized the 14th century contest between John XXII and defenders of Catholic orthodoxy over the issue of the Beatific Vision after death. Read it here.
Was de Mattei’s essay, written in advance of Amoris Laetitia, prophetic? Or was it an anticipatory stroke by a well-placed historian with his ear to the ground? I cannot say. But it is no stretch to read his essay as a bugle call to the faithful to grapple with any pope who takes it upon himself to nullify the episcopate and redefine doctrine to conform to his own lights.
While John XXII came to heel eventually, any such conciliatory act by Francis seems unlikely. He is the beneficiary of two forces.
- First, there is the willed assumption — a diplomatic pretense? - that the ambiguity of Amoris Laetitia is inadvertent, an oversight rather than a tactic.
- Second, there is the cult of papal veneration, a toxic bloom with tangled roots.
Singular deference to the person of the pope is the disfiguring aftereffect of conflation of papal primacy with papal inerrancy — on whatever matter the papal druthers plant a battle flag. Among the laity, the fusion exists as a species of idolatry. Papalolotry is today’s word for it.
Among the episcopate, the amalgam counts as a courtier’s safeguard against rousing the ire of a king. Few in upper management want to be exiled to an obscure diocese by lordly resentment. At court, the rightful authority of bishops is checked by courtesy and reliance on royal favor. Amenability serves job security and advancement better than debate.
Inklings of futility lurk in the Correctio‘s terms of address to Francis. It opens on bended knee by pledging “filial devotion toward yourself.” Filial, rather than fraternal, is a telling genuflection. So is the signatories’ reference to themselves as “subjects” (“subjects have by nature a duty to obey their superiors in all lawful things”). [I am sure the signatories were only too aware they had to observe respectful and deferential form by using these terms, otherwise they would have been accused a priori of insulting the ‘Holy Father’ not just by questioning his teaching but by being such jerks as to fail to observe expected form in terms of addressing him. JMB can be a boor as he often is, but that does not excuse being a boor yourself. In accordance with traditional usage, they couldn’t properly say ‘fraternal’ rather than ‘filial’, because somehow, the ‘Holy Father’ part has overshadowed the mandate to ‘confirm thy brethren in their faith’, for which ‘fraternal’ would be appropriate. However, the use of the word ‘subjects’ is truly jarring, as the faithful are by no means considered ‘subjects’ of the pope (except when the popes had temporal power and you happened to live in a papal state, then you were also a subject of the pope).]
Wording echoes the tone of Pius X’s comments in 1906 that “the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led...like a docile flock.” Francis’s pontificate illustrates the hazards of such cast of mind.
The people of God are not children. Rightly ordered in their relationships to one another — include clergy here — neither are they subjects. Certainly not as that word is commonly understood. Catholics are subject to the Gospels and to the magisterium oriented toward them. But neither we nor the episcopate are subjects of a pope in the menial, subservient sense carried by that plural noun. The Bishop of Rome serves as “first among equals,” not as an imperial monarch ascendant over an episcopacy reduced to the status of delegates for papal sovereignty.
Bishops are not vassals of the throne. Apostolic ministry does not exist to rubber stamp the politics or subversive cunning of a willful or wayward pope. In the increasingly bureaucratized structure of Church governance, however, that appears to matter less than it should.
It does not serve Francis’s objectives to clarify the ambiguities in Amoris Laetitia. He has only to allow the vagueness of “pastoral discernment” to stand. It will come by degrees to be the default position in pastoral care. Moral thinking will evolve — develop — to further accommodate the subjectivity implicit in discernment and in such fluid standards as accompaniment in weakness.
A discretionary end run around indissolubility will gradually assume the authority of Tradition, thereby deflecting need for clarification. Longevity will short-circuit any lingering effort to undo what will have become standard pastoral practice.
Not a word need be uttered to modify doctrinal insistence on the indissolubility of marriage or to palliate eucharistic prohibitions for the divorced and remarried. In the name of “complex realities” and “difficult situations,” a hit-or-miss, sentimental concept of charity will quietly displace adherence to outworn disciplines. Give Amoris Laetitia another generation or two and indissolubility, traditionally invoked, will molder in the archive of insensitivities for which some future pontiff can permit himself to apologize.
And the above practical facts of life are precisely what Bergoglio is counting on for his changes to ‘live on’ in the Catholic Church, not just in the church of Bergoglio. Look how all but a relative few in the vast Catholic world willingly threw out the Traditional Mass literally overnight - it didn't take even a few years for the Novus Ordo to be completely and universally accepted as 'the Mass'.]
It discomforts me to say so, but the names on the initial letter of correction are not ones to cause undue anxiety in Casa Santa Marta. They are names best known and respected among conservative Catholics — those rosary-counting, neopelagian irritants already under Francis’s skin.
Where were the world’s bishops when the letter was initially circulated? Bernard Fellay, an SSPX bishop, lent his name to the document afterward; retired Bishop René Gracida of Miami did the same. At the outset, no active member of the USCCB risked his signature. By the USCCB’s own numbers, there are 446 active and retired bishops plus 6 cardinals and another 7 retired cardinals. Only one retiree could hazard signing? The numbers bespeak an episcopacy reduced from one of agency in its own right to mere spokesmen for the pontificate.
A gelded episcopacy is a sorry omen. It augurs Francis’s ultimate success in capsizing the perennial understanding of the nature of Christian marriage. There need be no de jure change in doctrine. Indissolubility will remain on the books where it will retain its aura of prescribed authority. But in pastoral practice varieties of a hardship exemption will gradually enfeeble the rule.
No one should be surprised. Francis’s revised, user-friendly annulment process comes on the heels of decades of profligate dispensing of annulments in major jurisdictions and/or for persons of influence. It follows a trajectory that has already weakened the principle of life-long marriage. (Annulment was little more than a religious fiction in the Archdiocese of Brooklyn under Francis Mogavero.) Misuse of a just and necessary procedure has given annulment the tag “Catholic divorce” for good reason. Then tally in last year’s capricious declaration by Francis that some half of all sacramental marriages are invalid. Indissolubility has been dissolving for some time.
Francis’s divorced and remarried Catholics purportedly clamoring for admission to the Eucharist parallel Barack Obama’s Dreamers. Both populations find their illicit situations stressful. Existing civic and sacramental protocols designed to amend dereliction in both sets of circumstances are deemed onerous. Absolutes are inconsiderate, unwieldy. Relativism is more workable. It appears kindly in the short term, however mischievous in the long. Francis’s flexible magisterium, packaged in the rhetoric of mercy — pious-sounding gift wrap [and Bergoglio's all-purpose gift-wrapping for all problems, at least those he deigns to answer] — negates those ancient obligations that define a community. No dream should be deferred.
Political historian Paul A. Rahe, a practicing Catholic, did not mince words in his September 15 essay for Ricochet, “An Unworthy Pope:”
Francis is a student of theology — not an especially astute student, but he knows a thing or two. What makes him a very great
fool is that he is not a student of economics, climate science, or national security, and that this defect does not in
any way discourage him from pontificating (I use the word advisedly) on these subjects and making a great display
of his ignorance.”
Rahe’s professional interest in the history and character of political regimes makes him particularly suited to view the Bergoglian regime with a clear eye. He strikes the proper tone — a lovely acid bite — in addressing Francis’s pretensions to statecraft. No courtly flattery. At stake are issues too grave for ceremonious bowing and scraping.
It turns out that Dr. Peters has the same reservation about a statement by Mullarkey in the above article...
On 'conservative Catholics' and the papacy
Orthodox, conservative Catholics are both
ecclesial monarchists and are ecclesial collegialists
by Edward N. Peters
October 20, 2017
Maureen Mullarkey’s recent post on Amoris laetitia contains a line that bears nuancing not just because it is misleading, and not just because it is widely held, but because getting the principle that underlies it correct would reinforce Mullarkey’s mention of “a bugle call to the faithful to grapple with any pope who takes it upon himself to nullify the episcopate”.
Mullarkey writes: “The absolutist temper of a monarchial papacy, in which all authority flows downward from the Chair of Peter, is a cherished model among conservative Catholics.” Hmmm.
If by “conservative Catholics” Mullarkey means conservatives who are Catholic or Catholics who are conservative maybe she’s right. I wouldn’t know. But if by “conservative Catholics” Mullarkey means ‘Catholics who hold demonstrably orthodox views in doctrinal matters and accept the disciplinary consequences that flow from such views’ (which is what I think Mullarkey means), then her assertion that these Catholics ‘cherish’ a model of the papacy according to which “all authority flows down from the Chair of Peter” is seriously deficient.
“Conservative Catholics” are, to be sure, very comfortable with (though they might not be able to quote) Canon 331 as it sets out, among other things, the Roman Pontiff’s “supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church”. They cherish papal power and thank Jesus that He left such authority to St. Peter and his successors. So far, so good.
But well-informed “conservative Catholics” will also know that, per Canon 336, the college of bishops “is also the subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church,” in other words, that there are two foci of “supreme and full power” in the Church, a pope (who can act alone) and a college of bishops (i.e., a pope and the bishops in communion with him who cooperate with each other in a magnificent and mysterious manner distinguishable from a pope acting on his own).
It is this second focus of supreme and full power in the Church, one overlooked by Mullarkey but which Francis’s manner of governing is causing prelates and professors alike to begin to re-examine after several decades of post-conciliar quiescence, that bears closer examination — certainly closer than a blog post can offer.
In short, “conservative Catholics” are both ecclesial monarchists and they are ecclesial collegialists; noting the latter aspect of their ecclesiology (theirs, because it is the Church’s), instead of just noting the former, might help Mullarkey to demonstrate how Francis is setting lots of people to thinking about lots of things these days.
In this respect, Bergoglio has made many more Catholics aware of Canon 212 which prevents (or ought to prevent) any Catholic from thinking that 'The Pope says...' is always right and therefore binding, that they can and should, in fact, express their protest and disagreement with whatever papal statement or action manifestly appears to be not in conformity with the deposit of faith. [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/10/2017 00:49] |