Satanic fruits of Francischurch...
The Cowardice and Hubris of Francis-Bergoglio
By Michael Brendan Dougherty
To
universal fanfare from the mainstream and Catholic media, Pope Francis has
issued a long-awaited document, Amoris Laetitia, "the Joy of Love,"
as his conclusion to the Catholic Church's two-year Synod on the Family.
But to this Catholic, the pope's
supposedly reformist document is a botch job.
For
two years, bishops presented their respective cases for two contradicting views
of marriage, re-marriage, and the Church's own sacraments. Pope Francis didn't
choose between these two options. He chose them both. The pope did not effect some grand
synthesis. He merely gave his imprimatur to the Church's own confused practice
on these matters and, more frighteningly, to its self-doubt.
As a result, the Joy of Love reads as an
admission that God, as Catholics understand him, really isn't merciful or
gracious to poor sinners. So priests should try to do better from now on.
All
of this requires some explanation. While the document spends hundreds of pages,
some of them quite good, and others quite banal, on the meaning of Christian
marriage and family life, the headlines and anxiety all revolve around one
topic. The "Great Matter" of the two-year Synod on the Family came
down to one question: Can the divorced and re-married receive holy communion
without obtaining an annulment or otherwise amending their life?
The
Church's traditional reasoning is straightforward. If a valid, sacramental
marriage is indissoluble, and someone contracts and lives within a second civil
marriage, they are committing the sin of adultery, and doing so publicly. Like
anyone in a state of mortal sin — for instance, someone who knowingly missed
Sunday Mass through their own fault — they are to exclude themselves from
communion, lest they commit a further sin of sacrilege. If they repent of the
sin and want to amend their life, they can make a sacramental confession and
return.
The
German Cardinal Walter Kasper has proposed a way around this — a kind of
penitential path in which the remarried person admits some responsibility for
their failed first marriage, but persists in the second. For two years,
cardinals and bishops lined up on opposing sides of this proposal. Some argued
for retaining the Church's traditional understanding and practice. Others
pressed for some kind of "pastoral" accommodation to better integrate
those who persist in their second marriage into the life of the Church.
Pope Francis sided with all of the
above. And he did it not by effecting some greater synthesis, but by cowardly
obfuscation.
Pope
Francis tries to reframe what Catholics have long understood as the truth about
marriage and chastity as merely an ideal, possibly an impossible or oppressive
one, if taken too seriously by mere Christians. He pits his concept of mercy
against marriage, as if a true understanding of the latter were a threat to the
former. Pope Francis reveals himself to be a pope of his times, and embodies
the defects of the Church he leads; Amoris Laetitia is characterized by
loquacity and evasiveness in trying to dignify and disguise moral cowardice
borne from a lack of faith.
Chapter
8 of this heralded document begins by describing the kind of person in an
"irregular union" who might be considered for
pastoral counseling back toward communion. It describes that person as someone
possessed of "humility, discretion, and love for the Church." The
question of whether this person has sincere sorrow for sin and a firm purpose
to amend their life is side-stepped. Repentance and conversion? How old
fashioned. Even the term "irregular union" is evidence of the way the
Church is abandoning its understanding of adultery,
draining away the moral force of its own teaching, as if marriage were merely a
matter of paperwork yet to be amended.
Francis
cites well-known Catholic teaching about whether a person is truly and fully
culpable for their sins as if it were a new revelation, and then draws reckless
conclusions from it, such as in paragraph 301 of chapter 8, where Francis
simply announces, "Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in
any 'irregular' situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived
of sanctifying grace." One can see how this substitution of
"ideals" for commandments works when, in paragraph 303, Pope Francis
posits, absurdly, that in some instances the most generous response a person
can offer to God's grace is still itself "not fully the objective
ideal."
The message is clear: God's grace is
insufficient to assist you to do what he asks of you. Jesuits can do better.
Finally,
although the pope rejects a formal institution of the Kasper proposal as a
general rule, he strongly encourages the readmission of people in
"objectively" adulterous unions to holy communion. He doesn't trumpet
this, of course. He buries it in the 351st footnote. For a man showing such
great audacity before God, Francis certainly isn't bold before men.
Many
conservatives are revealing themselves as cowards, too. They hope that because
the pope's document seems so confused and self-contradictory, because it hides
its innovations under a ton of verbiage, and buried within footnotes, and
because it is merely an exhortation and not a more lofty encyclical, that they
can embrace what is good in the document, and pass over the rest. "It
could have been worse," they are telling themselves. "It cites the
Church's teaching against contraception, at least." I would remind them
that their forebears said the same thing about the Vatican II's document on the
liturgy. "Oh, it says Latin shall be retained, it promotes Gregorian chant,"
they comforted themselves. As now, the betrayal of the institution was too
unthinkable, and they willfully overlooked the footnotes that contained within
them a mandate to destroy high altars, tabernacles, altar rails, and institute
folk music in a synthetic vernacular liturgy. So too, many conservatives will
try to find the good parts, an easy feat in a document so prolix.
But
progressives are not so timid. In the talking points handed out to bishops and
other spokesmen ahead of the document, the intention was made clear, but
plausibly deniable. "Pastors need to do everything possible to help people
in these situations to be included in the life of the community." Words
like "possible" and "inclusion" are left to be interpreted
broadly, from the footnotes. Cardinal Kasper described the document glowingly
as a "definite opening." Cardinal Schonborn boldly papered over
differences between Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II by describing the work
of Francis in Amoris Laetitia as the development of doctrine.
Traditionalist
critics of the modern Church have a kind of slogan: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi,
the law of prayer is the law of belief. It's hard not to see how the already
incoherent prayer of the Church is leading to incoherent doctrine and practice.
The Church officially teaches that confession is necessary to be restored to
holy communion after committing a mortal sin, and that receiving communion in a
state of sin is itself sacrilege. Yet rare is the pastor who seems troubled by
the long lines for communion and the near disappearance of the sacrament of
confession among the people in his parish. Everyone just sort of knows the
Church doesn't really mean what it says.
The
Church's blasé attitude here has a pedagogical effect, teaching people that
there is no need to have a holy respect or fear when approaching the altar.
Naturally, this attitude has worked its way up the chain to a papal
pronouncement. Pope Francis' document justifies people receiving communion in a
public state of sin by saying that the Eucharist is "not a prize" for
good behavior. That is true. But instead the Church has turned it into a
participation trophy, something so perfunctory and ultimately meaningless that
it seems just too cruel to deny it to anyone.
Perhaps
worse than Pope Francis' official invitation to sacrilege is the document's
cowardice, cynicism, and pessimism. The Church can no longer even bring itself
to condemn respectable sins such as civilly approved adultery. It can barely
bring itself to address a man or woman as if they had a moral conscience that
could be roused by words like "sin." Instead, it merely proposes
ideals; ideals cannot be wounded by your failure to realize them. And it
promises to help you out of your "irregular" situation.
This
supposed paean to love is something much sadder. A Church so anxious to include
and accept you that it must deny the faith that transforms and renews you. It
admits that God's commands are not just beyond our reach, but possibly
destructive to follow.
Pope
Francis is trying to be more merciful than God himself. He ends up being more
miserly and condescending instead.
