Fr H s among the first Anglophone commentators to react to the Pledge of Fidelity, and reiterates his view that the Church should consider herself today in the state of
suspended Magisterium that Blessed John Henry Newman postulated in the 19th century about the period of the Arian crisis...
'The temporary suspense of
the function of the Ecclesia Docens'
December 13, 2017
A world-wide group of laymen and laywomen have just issued a defence of Catholic doctrine concerning Family and Life matters. The crucial paragraph, in my view, is this:
We pledge our full obedience to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the legitimate exercise of is authority. However, nothing will ever persuade us, or compel us, to abandon or contradict any article of the Catholic faith or any truth definitively established.
If there is any conflict between the words and acts of any member of the hierarchy, even the pope, and the doctrine that the Church has always taught, we will remain faithful to the perennial teaching of the Church. If we were to depart from the Catholic faith, we would depart from Jesus Christ, to whom we wish to be united for all eternity."
This seems to me exactly right and exactly proportionate to the present situation in the Catholic Church.
By a happy disposition of Providence, this Statement hit the media at the same time as
Walter Kasper's gleeful conviction that Amoris laetitia has now become irreformable and that the 'controversy' is now over. Gracious me, what ultrahyperueberpapalist views of the Petrine Ministry these Liberals do have when they get a foul wind into their sails.
And the Statement reminds me of the phrase which Blessed John Henry Newman used in the context of
the Arian controversy, in which the great majority of the Bishops, the Ecclesia docens (the teaching Church) including the Successor of S Peter, were either heretics, or were cowed into silence or compromise by the heretics. It is the phrase I have put at the head of this post, which I take in the sense in which Newman subsequently clarified his use of it, and not otherwise.
I suppose we had a good example of this phenomenon of 'suspense' in the pontificate of Blessed Paul VI, in the period between his setting up of a Commission to consider the question of contraception, and his very courageous subsequent reaffirmation of the Church's Magisterial Teaching with the publication of Humanae vitae.
Surely, we are in another such period of suspense now. The question of the admission of adulterers to Holy Communion was magisterially dealt with as recently as 2007, only ten years ago, in
Sacramentum Caritatis para 29; it had received synodical and papal clarification in each of the last two pontificates; and is embedded in the Catechism.
But a 'suspense'of that Magisterial teaching began when it was opened up to synodal debate; and that 'suspense' grew wider when PF issued a document which has been interpreted in diametrically opposed ways. The Suspense will end when this or a subsequent Roman Pontiff or an Ecumenical Council reasserts with unmistakeable clarity the teaching of the Magisterium (or possibly when the error, having run its course, happily dies a natural death).
The learned Patron of the Ordinariate, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, made clear that
he in no way implied the cessation of the Magisterial teaching or office during a 'suspense'. The Dogma of Nicea remained de jure fully in force; but was simply not treated as such by many bishops and so did not 'function'.
The bishops remained ex officio guardians and teachers of the Faith; not a microgram of their God-given authority to teach the Faith was lost to them; but de facto they failed to guard and to teach that Faith. The concept of suspense is not so much theological as historical.
Things now are very similar. The teaching of the Magisterium is still, obviously, formally still
vigore pleno; but numbers of unfaithful or negligent bishops behave as though it were not. In many cases, they appear and/or claim to do so with the connivance of the Successor of St Peter.
During a 'suspense', does the episcopal ministry of those bishops who are heterodox on just one point still call for
religiosum obsequium on other matters? Or is one obliged to consider their entire episcope vitiated by just one point of heterodoxy?
Looking back into the great Anglican Patrimony which Pope Benedict invited us to bring with us into Catholic Unity, I recall a phrase dear to a distinguished and erudite Bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore [1853-1932; a doughty asserter of the doctrine which was re-asserted by
Casti Connubii]:
The wonderful coherence of Christian doctrine".
A later, even more erudite occupant of the same See, Kenneth Kirk, [1886-1954] commented:
"Gore saw Christian doctrine as a unified whole ... It was his conviction, shared of course with the great Scholastic tradition in theology, that if any single article in this totality was attacked, varied, or distorted, the attack, variation, or distortion would be seen on inspection to affect every other article to a greater or lesser degree. ...
If two systems each of which can claim some real degree of logical principle are in conflict on any one point, investigation will ultimately prove that they differ on every point, though at first sight this may be anything but apparent. For each system is, by hypothesis, self-consistent, and therefore all its members are interlocked, and whatever affects one of them must affect them all."
This is still one of my own working hermeneutical tools. Accordingly,
I feel a tentative [???] hesitation, during this lamentable suspense, about taking seriously any teaching statement of an apparently less than orthodox member of the hierarchy.
I throw open the above position to discussion, totally aware of my own fallibility, and anxious to be in all things
a docile subject of the authentic Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
And I applaud the statement of Fidelity to Catholic Teaching issued by these eminent and admirable laypeople.
In the context of the Newman postulate, what Fr. De Souza ultimately concludes in the piece below is far from convincing - though it would be a 'best case' scenario. Eespecially given that he precedes it with six reasons why the ' magisterial upgrade' to the Argentine bishops' letter and the pope's reply to it is at best dubious, and that he quotes the duplicitous reasoning of Cardinal Marc Ouellet published in L'Osservatore Romano recently to justify his ultimate conclusion - and does not void the logical need to consider a magisterial suspense on this matter. (The cardinal is Fr. De Souza's Canadian compatriot so perhaps that explains the latter's persuasion about Ouellet's reasoning.)
Pope’s AL guidelines via the bishops
of Argentina get an upgrade
Their elevation to the AAS raises new questions, but clearly [???] rules out
more adventurous interpretations of the Holy Father’s apostolic exhortation
by Father Raymond J. de Souza, SJ
December 12, 2017
The latest clarification of the proper interpretation of Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) raises new questions, with perhaps unexpected answers.
In September 2016, the bishops of the Buenos Aires pastoral region released guidelines for the interpretation of Chapter VIII of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, which addresses the situation of those in a sacramental marriage but living in conjugal union with someone else, and perhaps civilly married.
On the same day the guidelines were released, the Pope wrote a private letter to the Buenos Aires bishops commending their efforts and saying that there were “no other interpretations.” This letter was first leaked to the press and then put on the Vatican website.
Pope Francis has now decreed that both the Buenos Aires guidelines and his letter be included in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (Acts of the Apostolic See) as acts of the “authentic magisterium” of the Roman Pontiff. The AAS is like the official gazette of a government where official regulations are published.
Not everything in the AAS is an exercise of the magisterium, but magisterial acts are recorded there.
The Buenos Aires guidelines were widely read as permitting, under limited circumstances related to reduced culpability, admission to confession and Holy Communion of those living in conjugal unions outside of a valid marriage.
However, the guidelines themselves could also be read as conforming to the prevailing teaching of the Church as found in St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. So the Buenos Aires text itself did not resolve the ambiguities in Amoris Laetitia. At the time, I examined the guidelines in detail.
As for the “no other interpretations” approval letter of Pope Francis, it was private correspondence. No matter how cleverly leaked to the press, it was not a magisterial act.
It is important to know what the Pope thinks but is not necessarily relevant to what the Pope is officially teaching. The papal letter had no standing. Now it does. What does that mean? There are six considerations that come to mind.
— First, it is a novelty. The letter to the Buenos Aires bishops now appears in the AAS as a formal apostolic letter, for example, like the Holy Father wrote to conclude the Jubilee of Mercy.
It never was an apostolic letter before, not when it was written, not when it was received and not when leaked to the press.
An apostolic letter is not private correspondence. Yet what appears in the official record is now something that heretofore did not exist. Nevertheless, its curious retroactive change in status does not impinge on its authority. It now is an apostolic letter, even if it wasn’t when Pope Francis wrote it.
— Second, what the Holy Father meant when he wrote that “there are no other interpretations” is itself in need of further clarification. Does he mean that all interpretations other than the Buenos Aires guidelines are to be ignored, like those of, for example, the Holy Father’s own Diocese of Rome?
That can’t possibly be the case. [See comment after the following paragraph.]
Indeed, if only the Buenos Aires guidelines are correct, then it would rule out Pope Francis’s own 2014 telephone advice to a divorced-and-civilly-remarried woman in Argentina — without any pastoral accompaniment — to receive Holy Communion in another parish after her pastor advised her otherwise.
So it must mean only those guidelines that are in conformity with the Buenos Aires guidelines are accurate reflections of Amoris Laetitia. [No, Father! You are projecting logic onto a person who acts out of whim and whimsy or sentiment rather than logic. Following your reasoning, it is just as likely therefore that what Bergoglio told the woman in a telephone conversation is what he really wanted AL to say, with or without pastoral accompaniment - the letter being a necessary 'anti-heretical' proviso in AL, since telling the woman to just go receive communion with a priest who would give it to her was basically telling her to ignore everything the Church had taught about adultery and sacrilegious communion.]
— Third, that raises the question of which guidelines could be read as compatible with Buenos Aires.
Though differing in emphasis, the guidelines of Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia and the bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories do not contradict Buenos Aires. So they would appear to be valid.
That’s not the case for the bishops of Malta, whose guidelines go much further than Buenos Aires, with a wholly different understanding of conscience. Therefore, it would appear that the upgraded apostolic letter makes room for Philadelphia and Alberta, but rules out Malta. That is counter-intuitive, but is a reasonable reading of what “no other interpretations” means.
[Again, Fr. De Souza seems to be having selective blindness here. 'Other interpretations' could just as well - and probably did in this case - refer to the interpretations of those who said "No - under no circumstances can remarried divorcees receive absolution and communion if they continue to live in adultery".]
— Fourth, does the new apostolic letter contradict Amoris Laetitia itself? Perhaps so, for in No. 300, Pope Francis writes that “priests have the duty to ‘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 …’”
If the bishop is to establish guidelines, but the Buenos Aires guidelines are the only guidelines possible, what is the point?
Paragraph 300 opens with the observation that “if we consider the immense variety of concrete situations such as those I have mentioned, it is understandable that neither the synod nor this exhortation could be expected to provide a new set of general rules, canonical in nature and applicable to all cases.”
What, then, is the difference between guidelines about which there are “no other interpretations” and general rules that cannot be provided? Are the Buenos Aires guidelines general rules or local rules to be mandated generally?
[So, with the above argument, Fr. De Souza has just demolished his own openly charitable interpretations so far!]
— Fifth, the Buenos Aires apostolic letter does not address directly the key question that Amoris Laetitia raised, which is how to resolve apparent conflicts between it and previous, clearly expressed magisterial teaching.
For example, Amoris Laetitia No. 303 teaches:
“Naturally, every effort should be made to encourage the development of an enlightened conscience, formed and guided by the responsible and serious discernment of one’s pastor, and to encourage an ever greater trust in God’s grace. Yet conscience can do more than recognize that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal.”
That appears to conflict with the teaching of St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which says that an intrinsically sinful act, if understood to be so, can never be done, much less be what God himself is asking.
The Buenos Aires guidelines do not address specifically that question, but the thrust of the guidelines actually militates against such a “creative” view of conscience. It is therefore possible that the Buenos Aires guidelines discreetly demur from the teaching of Amoris Laetitia, 303, a demurral that it is now officially endorsed by the Holy Father. That confusion would be dizzying. [But it is specious circular reasoning like Fr. De Souza advances that causes confusion where there shouldn't be confusion. Even for an anti-logical person like Bergoglio, is it really plausible to say that by whatever assent he has given to the Argentine bishops guidelines he has thereby contradicted himself in AL? Come on! Common sense alone says NO!]
— Sixth, and further to the point above,
the Buenos Aires guidelines seek to resolve the ambiguities in the Pope’s exhortation by restricting themselves to the grounds of reduced culpability, i.e., that one cannot be guilty of a mortal sin if there is no freedom to act otherwise. That is not in contradiction with previous teaching and is a pastoral principle often applied in matters relating to chastity.
[But once the adulterer confesses to a priest, the latter is dutybound to point out why the confessee is living in mortal sin, at which point, the latter is no longer 'culpable by ignorance' and must decide if he desires communion enough to be able to amend his life accordingly, i.e., by abstaining from the conjugal act for as long as the sacramental marriage of either or both spouses has not been annulled. But that seems to be a condition that Bergoglio has never even verbalized in any way - it's just not a 'nice', convenient or pleasant proposition to make!]
Cardinal Marc Ouellet, in a September 2017 address to the Canadian bishops, subsequently published in L’Osservatore Romano, explicitly states that this is only as far as Amoris Laetitia goes:
“The novelty of Amoris Laetitia consists in offering benchmarks to assess extenuating circumstances that diminish the subjective imputability of an objective state of sin and thus lift an obstacle to sacramental life.”
The novelty is not changing the norm nor does it change the role of conscience, but rather clarifies the factors that mitigate culpability.
[But those mitigating factors cease the moment the adulterer confesses to a priest who respects the sacraments and who must show the sinner in what way he has been sinning and how best to get out of that chronic state of sin.]
Should Cardinal Ouellet’s careful address find itself, in future, elevated in the AAS to the status of “authentic magisterium,”
it does offer a response — in a footnote, suitably enough! — to the apparent conflict between Amoris Laetitia, 303, and Veritatis Splendor.
Cardinal Ouellet flatly concludes that Amoris Laetitia “does not distance itself from Veritatis Splendor with respect to the question of determining the objective morality of human acts and of the fundamental role of conscience as a ‘witness’ to the divine law inscribed in the sacred depths of each person.” [Yes, but the statement ignores the logical consequence once the objective morality of a specific case of adultery and the role of 'conscience' in the lifestyle decisions of the adulterer(s) has been properly 'discerned' with the help of a priest who knows and respects sacramental discipline.]
The Buenos Aires guidelines are less explicit, but are easily read in the same vein as Cardinal Ouellet’s address, namely that
Amoris Laetitia has to be read in light of Veritatis Splendor. [Why, Your Eminence, must it be mandatory to do that? - especially considering that four of the five DUBIA specifically state AL's contradiction of general principles oin VS!] Does the new apostolic letter of Pope Francis implicitly concede that point?
If we assume communications between Curial cardinals are functioning well, it is likely that Cardinal Ouellet knew about the apostolic letter upgrade when he addressed the Canadian bishops in September.
Where does all this leave us? In much of the same place, though with
the clarification that the most adventurous interpretations of Amoris Laetitia, like those in Malta, are now definitively ruled out. [Wishful thinking, Father! Is there any Vatican statement out there that ever contradicted the interpretation of the (two) bishops of Malta???]
Sandro Magister reacts to the ex post facto magisterial upgrade of the private letters between the bishops of Buenos Aires and the pope about the practical (i.e., pastoral) interpretation of AL...
'The pope has spoken' - or so it seems
But the DUBIA remain, as does Cardinal Caffarra's legacy
December 13, 2017
Two [related] things happened almost on the same day. On the one hand, the publication in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis of that which is presented as the official and definitive interpretation of the controversial eighth chapter of “Amoris Laetitia,” in favor of communion for the divorced and remarried.
On the other the release of a book with homilies and texts by Carlo Caffarra, one of the four cardinals who submitted to Pope Francis their very serious DUBIA precisely on that chapter.
News of the first of these two publications came in early December, when the new volume of the official “Acta” of the Holy See came off the press. But the decision to print the letter in which the pope approves the criteria adopted by the bishops of the region of Buenos Aires for the application of the eighth chapter of “Amoris Laetitia” dates back to six months before, to June 5.
That was, in fact, the day on which Francis gave the order to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state, to proceed with the official publication of both of those documents, the pope’s letter and the text of the Argentine bishops, “
velut Magisterium authenticum,” as authentic magisterum.
This is what it states in Latin in the endnotes for the two documents, on page 1074 of the “Acta Apostolicae Sedis,” An. et vol. CVIII, n. 10:
RESCRIPTUM "EX AUDIENTIA SS.MI"
Summus Pontifex decernit ut duo Documenta quae praecedunt edantur per publicationem in situ electronico Vaticano et in "Actis Apostolicae Sedis", velut Magisterium authenticum.
Ex Aedibus Vaticanis, die V mensis Iunii anno MMXVII
Petrus Card. Parolin
Secretarius Status
The two documents were published in Spanish, their original language, with the pope’s letter placed first and bearing the title and qualification of “Epistula Apostolica,” followed by the text of the Argentine bishops, presented as “Additum ad Epistulam,” meaning an attachment to the papal letter.
It would therefore seem that with this Francis wanted to resolve once and for all the ambiguities of “Amoris Laetitia,” eliminating any doubt over his intention that
under certain conditions the divorced and remarried could receive Eucharistic communion while continuing to cohabit more uxorio (as husband and wife).
In the letter, in fact, he writes that the text of the Argentine bishops “explains in an excellent way chapter VIII of ‘Amoris Laetitia.’ There are no other interpretations.”
This last sentence, however, raises a few doubts.
If that of the bishops of the region of Buenos Aires is truly the only interpretation admitted by the pope, then what becomes of the solemn affirmations also written by the pope in the opening of “Amoris Laetitia,” according to which it is right that there should exist “various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it,” so that “each country or region can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs”? [See the fallacy and futility of seeking to attribute logic to a contra-logical person?]
What would become, for example, of more restrictive interpretations, like that of the Polish bishops or of the archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput? Or vice-versa, of more expansive interpretations, like that of the German bishops or of the even more reckless bishop of San Diego, Robert McElroy? Should they all be corralled within the criteria established by the Argentine bishops, because after all “there are no other interpretations”?
But even in Argentina, was it not perhaps going beyond the prudential criteria of his confreres of the region of Buenos Aires when the bishop of Reconquista, Ángel José Macín, publicly and collectively celebrated, in the cathedral, the return to communion of thirty couples of divorced and remarried persons who continue to cohabit
more uxorio?
[Which the Vatican never denounced nor even offered one word of reproof! After all, is that not what Jorge Bergoglio had been doing for years - though perhaps not en masse - in Buenos Aires when he was bishop there? The proof is always in the pudding, not in any recipe for it!]
Neither is it by any means clear what “authentic magisterium” means as applied both to the “apostolic letter” of Pope Francis and to its attachment.
Nor is it clear how this act of “magisterium” can be reconciled with canon 915 of the code of canon law that forbids communion for those who “obstinately persevere in manifest grave sin.” [A crucial point that Fr. De Souza totally ignores in his novel but condition-laden apologia pro AL!] Doubts have been raised on both of these points by a talented canonist like the American Edward Peters.
But getting back to June 5, the day on which Francis ordered the publication of the two documents as official proceedings of the Holy See, on that date the pope had had on his desk for a month the heartfelt letter in which Cardinal Caffarra asked him for an audience together with the other cardinals of the DUBIA which he resubmitted intact.
Of course, as we all know, neither the DUBIA nor this letter ever received a response, nor can the publication of those two documents in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis be seen as one. Caffarra died on September 6, and even then, the pope has held himself back from exprssing any sign of esteem for him, even on October 1 when he went to visit Bologna, the diocese of which the deceased cardinal was archbishop from 2003 to 2015.
It was all the more striking, therefore, when on December 7, the day on which the book with the homilies and texts by Caffarra was released, a sincere and moving portrait of the cardinal appeared in
L'Osservatore Romano, with the title
“The gentle light of truth", which states among other things:
“He was greatly pained in recent years by the misunderstanding of which some of his theological positions were the object. He suffered, but in peace. On December 21, 2016 he wrote: ‘I am very serene. The only true suffering is to notice how much obsequiousness there is in the Church, and how much refusal to make use of the light of the intellect.’”
The author of the article, Emanuela Ghini, is a discalced Carmelite nun, highly esteemed for her writings on Sacred Scripture and spirituality. A few months ago there came out in bookstores a very interesting correspondence, spanning half a century, between her and the theologian and then cardinal Giacomo Biffi (1928-2015), Caffarra’s predecessor as archbishop of Bologna.
The preface to the correspondence between Biffi and Emanuela Ghini is by Caffarra himself, a close friend of both.
This is a book not to be missed, together with the one released in recent days with the homilies and texts of the cardinal, one page of which is reproduced below. It couldn’t be more timely.
THE FIVE SNARES FOR THE CHURCH TODAY
by Cardinal Carlo Caffarra
The alternative to a Church without doctrine is not a pastoral Church, but a Church of whim that is enslaved to the spirit of the time: “praxis sine theoria coecus in via” (Ptactice without theory is a blind man on the road), as the medievals used to say.
This is a serious snare, and if it is not overcome it causes great damage to the Church. For at least two reasons. The first is that, since Sacra Doctrina is nothing other than the divine Revelation of the divine plan for man, if the Church’s mission is not rooted in this, what is the Church saying to man?
The second reason is that when the Church does not protect itself from this snare, it is in danger of breathing the central dogma of relativism: When it comes to the worship that we owe to God and to the care we must have for man, it does not matter what I think about God and about man. The quaestio de veritate becomes a secondary question.
The second snare is to forget that the key to the interpretation of all reality and of human history in particular is not within history itself, but in faith.
Saint Maximus the Confessor maintains that the true disciple of Jesus thinks of everything in Jesus Christ and of Jesus Christ in everything.
Let me give a very timely example. The ennoblement of homosexuality, which we are witnessing in the West, must not be interpreted and judged by taking the mainstream of our societies as the criterion; nor should the moral value of respect that is due to every person - which is metabasis eis allo genos (changing the subject). The criterion is always and only the Sacra Doctrina on sexuality, marriage, sexual dimorphism. Reading the signs of the times instead is a theistical and theological act.
The third snare is the primacy of praxis. The foundation of the salvation of man is man’s faith, not his action.
What must concern the Church is not in primis cooperation with the world in grand operational processes to reach shared objectives. The tireless concern of the Church is that the world may believe in Him whom the Father has sent to save the world.
The primacy of praxis leads to what one great thinker of the past century called the dislocation of the Divine Persons, in which the second Person is not the Word, but the Holy Spirit.
The fourth snare, closely connected to the previous one, is the reduction of the Christian proposal to moral exhortation. It is the Pelagian snare, which Augustine called the horrible poison of Christianity. This reduction has the effect of making the Christian proposal very tedious, and repetitive. It is only God who in his action is always unpredictable. And in fact at the center of Christianity stands not the activity of man, but the Action of God.
The fifth snare is silence about the judgment of God, through a preaching of the divine mercy made in such a way that it risks removing from the conscience of the listener the truth that God judges man.
Two side notes. The first concerns the “great thinker of the past century” to whom Caffarra refers. This is the Swiss philosopher Romano Amerio (1905-1997), author of “
Iota Unum,” a formidable apologia for tradition against the “changes in the Catholic Church in the 20th century.”
The second concerns Cardinal Biffi. In addition to the correspondence with Emanuela Ghini, another valuable book of his has been released posthumously this year, “Things new and things old,” published by Cantagalli, which collects his pastoral texts between 1967 and 1975, when he was a parish priest in Legnano and Milan.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/12/2017 17:29]