On April
22, 2017 at the Hotel Columbus in Rome and in the vicinity of St. Peter's
Square a conference took place called "Seeing Clarity: One year after
Amoris Laetitia." It featured six eminent Catholic laymen who called on
Pope Francis to answer the dubia of the four cardinals on the matter of certain
passages in Amoris Laetitia, passages that undermine the Church's magisterial
teaching on adultery, mortal sin and the Holy Eucharist.
This is the
second of six, which will be posted on subsequent days.
A Year After "Amoris Laetitia". A Timely Word
by Dr. Anna M. Silvas
‘I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out all over the
world, and I said, groaning: ‘What can get through so many snares?’ Then I
heard a voice saying to me: ‘Humility’. So said Abba Antony the Great, Father
of Monks.
And so also it seems to me, in accepting to speak to you
now, a year after "Amoris Laetitia". Please forgive me, for it seems
to me any number of more qualified lay faithful should be speaking ahead of me.
The current field of the Church is so strewn with canonical, theological, and
ecclesiological snares, one would hardly dare say anything, so strange is this
hour in the Church.
If I were to point to one issue the present crisis in the
Church is, it would be ‘modernity’, and that mood in the Church that so greatly
prizes ‘modernity’ and follows it at all costs. Theologian Tracey Rowland
points out that ‘the modern’ to which we were urged to update, was never
defined in the documents of Vatican II, a truly extraordinary lacuna. She says:
‘The absence of a theological examination of this cultural phenomenon called
‘modernity’ or ‘the modern world’ by Conciliar fathers in the years 1962-65 is
perhaps one of the most striking features of the documents of the Second
Vatican Council.’ (1)
The Latin word moderna means the ‘just now’, the ‘latest’, the
‘most recent.’ The cult of modernity happens when we make this an overriding
object of desire, so to gain the approval of the elite classes, the captains of
the media and arbiters of culture. If I were to place the finger of diagnosis,
it would be precisely on this emulous desire.
Two years ago or so, a young friend of mine who is a teacher
and passionately committed in her Catholic faith, took a new job in a new
Catholic School. One day some of her Year 8 students did a class exercise in
‘politics’. Her students were in the second year of high-school, so they had
been through eight years of Catholic schooling, and through the whole
sacramental ‘program’—horrible word that; what does its use signify? She asked
that if they were a candidate for an upcoming election, what would would be
their policies. To her surprise, every one of them, except for one boy,
nominated same-sex marriage and the LGBT agenda. So she began to engage them in
remedial conversation. That brought home to me how far the values of a purely
secular modernity have more ascendency among ‘Catholics’ today, than the values
of the life in Christ and the teachings of the Church. Immersion in the
practices of modernity has led to a de facto situation, that the mythos of
modernity has seeped into the very bone-marrow and veins of Catholics. It
permeates their way of thinking and acting implicitly. I look around, and I
begin to wonder, with horror, how much this is now true of the leadership of
the Church, perhaps even among the best of them. How many are deeply, deeply,
more tributary to the modern world’s ‘program’, than obedient to Christ’s
summons to our deepest mind and heart, really?
Under St John-Paul II we seemed to have something of a
‘push-back’ for a while, at least in some areas, especially his intense
explication of the nuptial mystery of our first creation, in support of Humanae
Vitae. This continued under Benedict XVI, with some attempt to address
liturgical decay, and the moral ’filth’ of clerical sexual abuse. We had hoped
that some remediation at least was in train. Now, in the few short years of
Pope Francis’ pontificate, the stale and musty spirit of the seventies has
resurged, bringing with it seven other demons. And if we were in any doubt
about this before, "Amoris Laetitia" and its aftermath in the past
year make it perfectly clear that this is our crisis. That this alien spirit
appears to have finally swallowed up the See of Peter, dragging ever widening
cohorts of compliant higher church leadership into its net, is its most dismaying,
and indeed shocking aspect to many of us, the Catholic lay faithful. I look up
at any number of higher prelates, bishops and theologians, and I cannot detect
in them, by all that is holy, the least level of the sensus fidelium—and these
are bearers of the Church’s teaching office? Who would risk their immortal soul
by trusting to their moral judgment in Confession?
*
In preparation for this paper, I thoughtfully re-read
"Amoris Laetitia" after nearly a year. As I waded into the murky
waters of Chapter Eight, I was overwhelmingly confirmed in my reading of it
last year. In fact it seemed to me a worse document than I thought it was, and
I had thought it very bad.
There is no need here to offer further detailed analyses,
carried out by so many thoughtful commentators in the intervening year, such as
the early heroes Robert Spaeman and Roberto de Mattei, Bishop Schneider, the
’45 Theologians’, Finis and Grisez, and many others, all of whom should appear
on an roll-call of honour when the history of these times comes to be written.
There is one group however, whose approach I find very
strange: the intentionally orthodox among higher prelates and theologians who
treat the turmoil arising from "Amoris Laetitia" as a matter of
‘misinterpretations’. They will focus on the text alone, abstracted from any of
the known antecedents in the words and acts of Pope Francis himself or its
wider historical context. It is as if they interpose a chasm that cannot be
crossed between the person of the Pope on the one hand, over whose signature
this document was published, and the ‘text’ of the document on the other hand.
With the Holy Father safely quarantined out of all consideration, they are free
to address the problem, which they identify as ‘misuse’ of the text. They then
express the pious plea that the Holy Father will ‘correct’ these errors.
No doubt the perceived constraints of piety to the successor
of Peter account for these contorted manoeuvres. I know, I know! We have been
facing down that conundrum for a year or longer. But to any sane and thoughtful
reader, who, in the words of the 45 Theologian’s Censures, is ‘not trying to
twist the words of the document in any direction, but … take the natural or the
immediate impression of the meaning of the words to be correct’, this smacks of
a highly wrought artificiality.
Pope Francis’ ‘intent’ in this text is perfectly recoverable
from the text itself, reading normally and naturally and without filters. Let
us try some examples.
The first of the Cardinals’ Five Dubia concludes: ‘Can the
expression “in certain cases” found in Note 351 of the exhortation "Amoris
Laetitia" be applied to divorced persons who are in a new union and who
continue to live more uxorio?’ Without doubt, a papal clarification of the
intent in this footnote is of urgent importance to the Church. Nevertheless,
what the Pope intended is clear from the beginning of this current section
#301. His topic is ‘those living in “irregular situations”’. All that is said a
few lines later about those in situations of objective sin growing in grace and
charity and sanctification, maybe with the help of the sacraments, Holy
Communion in particular, is posted under this heading of ‘irregular
situations’.
That those in supposedly ‘sanctifying’ ‘irregular
situations’ who are admitted to the Eucharist include the divorced and civilly
remarried who do not intend to abrogate their sexual relationship, is flagged
in #298, where in footnote 329, a passage in G&S 51 which discusses the
question of temporary continence within marriage, as taught by St Paul, is
outrageously transposed to those not in a Christian marriage, i.e. in
‘irregular situations’, as an argument that they should not have to live as
brother and sister. The intention, prefaced by a misrepresentation of St John
Paul and a bare-faced lie about the meaning of G&S 51 is clear. So where is
the difficulty in understanding what the Pope intends?
In #299 Pope Francis asks us to discern ‘which of the
various forms of exclusion currently practised in the liturgical, pastoral,
educational and institutional framework, can be surmounted.’ This indicates his
aim clearly: how are we going to overcome those ‘exclusions’, liturgical first
of all, practised till now? Where is the difficulty in grasping Pope Francis’
intent?
And there are many other instances like this. As early as
the preface he alerts us that ‘everyone should feel challenged by Chapter
Eight”, and then late in that chapter (#308) admits obliquely that his approach
may leave room for confusion. Let us believe him: this is his intent, which is
not at all that difficult to grasp.
We have noted the abstract focus on the text alone that punctiliously
excludes the acts and the person of Pope Francis from all consideration of the
document’s intent. Also strictly excluded as a means of ascertaining the Pope’s
mind, are the wider historical antecedents. To pick off a few in a galaxy of
incidents, these include Archbishop Bergoglio’s known practice in his
archdiocese of tacitly admitting to Holy Communion all comers, the cohabiting,
as well as the divorced and civilly remarried (2), his personal choice of
Cardinal Kasper to deliver the opening address of the 2014 Synod, as if we are
to politely turn a blind eye to the entire back-history of Kasper’s activities
on these issues, the various ways in which these two synods were massaged, such
as the papal order that a proposition on communion for the divorced and
remarried, voted down by the bishops in the 2014 synod, be included in the
final relatio (3), his scathing condemnations of the Pharisees and other rigid
persons in his concluding address at the conclusion of the 2015 Synod, and more
recently, his warm praise of Bernard Häring, the doyen of dissenting moral
theologians throughout the 1970s and 80s, whose 1989 book on admitting the
divorced and civilly remarried to the Eucharist in imitation of the Eastern
Orthodox oikonomia, was ammunition in Kasper’s saddle bag. Then of course there
was Pope Francis’ endorsement of the Argentinian bishops ‘interpretation’ of
AL, precisely in the way that he intended: ‘No hay otras interpretaciones.’ (5)
You know all these incidents, and many, many more, almost on a daily basis, in
which it is not difficult to grasp Francis’ intent at all.
Pope Francis, I am sure, is very well aware of the doctrine
of papal infallibility, knows how high are its provisos—and is astute enough
never to trigger its mechanism. The unique prestige of the papacy in the
Catholic Church, together with the practical affective papalism of many
Catholics, however, are useful assets, and these he will exploit to the full.
For to Francis, and we have to grasp this: infallibility doesn’t matter, it
doesn’t matter at all, if he can continue to be the sort of change-agent in the
Church he wants to be. That this is his spirit we learn in AL #3 where he says:
‘Since “time is greater than space”, I would make it clear
that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be
settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is
certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of
interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from
it. This will always be the case as the Spirit guides us towards the entire
truth (cf. Jn 16:13), until he leads us fully into the mystery of Christ and
enables us to see all things as he does (5).
But I think ‘the spirit’ to which Francis so soothingly
alludes, has more to do with Hegel’s Geist, than with the Holy Spirit of whom
our blessed Lord speaks, the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive,
because it neither sees him nor knows him (Jn14:17). The Hegelian Geist on the
other hand, manifests itself in the midst of contradictions and oppositions,
surmounting them in a new synthesis, without eliminating the polarities or
reducing one to the other. This is the gnostic spirit of the cult of modernity.
So Francis will pursue his agenda without papal
infallibility, and without fussing about magisterial pronouncements. He tells
us so in the third paragraph of AL: Since “time is greater than space”, I would
make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues
need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium". We are in a world
of dynamic fluidity here, of starting open-ended processes, of sowing seeds of
desired change that will triumph over time. Other theorists—you have here in
Italy, Gramscii and his manifesto of cultural Marxism—teach how to achieve
revolution by stealth. So within the Church, Francis and his collaborators deal
with the matter of doctrine, not by confronting theory head on, because if they
did so they would be defeated, but by an incremental change of praxis, played
to the siren song of plausible persuasions, until the praxis is sufficiently
built up over time to a point of no return. Such underhand tactics are clearly
playing to the tune of Hegelian dialectic. That this is Pope Francis’s modus
operandi, consider a certain ‘behind the scenes incident’ in the 2015 Synod,
‘“If we speak explicitly about communion for the divorced and remarried,” said
Archbishop Forte, reporting a joke of Pope Francis, “you do not know what a
terrible mess we will make. So we won’t speak plainly, (but) do it in a way
that the premises are there, then I will draw out the conclusions.” “Typical of
a Jesuit,” Abp Forte joked (6).
Then slowly, region by region, bishops around the world
begin to ‘interpret’ AL to mean that the Church has now ‘developed’ her
pastoral praxis to admit the divorced and civilly remarried to the Eucharist,
setting aside the gravest of sacramental provisos that obtained up till
now—provided of course that a sonorous note of ‘accompaniment’ is struck. And
when Pope Francis sees this happening, what is his response? He rejoices to
find that they have accurately picked up his cues in AL: I have already
mentioned his famous ‘No hay otras interpretaciones’ to the Argentinian
bishops; the latest is his letter of thanks to the bishops of Malta for their
interpretations.
I think it an injustice to blame these bishops for ‘misuse’
of AL. No, they have drawn the conclusions patent to any thoughtful,
unblinkered reader of this papal document. The blame however, and the tragedy
for the Church lies in the intent embedded and articulated well enough in
"Amoris Laetitia" itself, and in the naïve papalism on the part of
bishops, that has so poor a purchase on the Church’s imperishable obedience of
faith, that it cannot perceive when it is under most dangerous attack, even
from that most lofty quarter.
In this game of subterfuge and incremental intent, the
elaborate talk of painstaking ‘discernment’ and ‘accompaniment’ of difficult
moral situations has a definite function—as a temporary blind for the ultimate
goal. Have we not seen how the dark arts of the ‘hard case’ work in secular
politicking, used to pivot the next tranche of social reengineering? So now in
the politics of the Church. The final result will be precisely in accord with
Archbishop Bergoglio’s tacit practice for years in Buenos Aires. Make no
mistake, the end game is a more or less indifferent permission for any who
present for Holy Communion. And so we attain the longed for haven of all-inclusiveness
and ‘mercy’: the terminal trivialization of the Eucharist, of sin and
repentance, of the sacrament of Matrimony, of any belief in objective and
transcendent truth, the evisceration of language, and of any stance of
compunction before the living God, the God of Holiness and Truth. If I may
adapt here a saying of St Thomas Aquinas: Mercy without truth is the mother of
dissolution (7).
Pope Francis has absolutely no intention of playing by
anyone’s ‘rules’—least of all yours or mine or anyone else’s ‘rules’ for the
papacy. You know well what he thinks of ‘rules’. He tell us so constantly. It
is one of the milder disparagements in his familiar stock of insults. When I
hear those who lecture us that Pope Francis is the voice of the Holy Spirit in the
Church today, I do not know whether to laugh at the naivety of it, or weep at
the damage being done to immortal souls. I would say that yes, Francis is the
agent of a spirit, namely the Hegelian Geist of ‘modernity’ very much at work
in the Church. It is, as I said earlier, a stale and musty spirit, an old
spirit that has no life in it, a privative force that only knows how to feed
parasitically on what already is. I am not sure that Newman’s Essay on the
Development of Doctrine does not give us all we need to face the present
crisis. In his seven ‘notes’ or criteria for discerning genuine development of
doctrine from its corruption, Newman provides the needed response to the
Hegelian praxis dialectically overwhelming theoria. The seventh note is “chronic
vigour”. Over time, a corruption shows itself to be exceedingly vigorous—but
only at the beginning of the “infection”, since it does not possess the life to
sustain itself in the long term.
It will run its course and die out. The Life of Grace, however, possesses in itself the Divine Life, and will therefore throw off in the course of time all that militates against it. Truth perdures. There will be moments of high drama, but, eventually, it must necessarily prevail. It is the way in which grace acts in the organic development of nature, the very reverse of the gnostic ‘time is greater than space’.
It will run its course and die out. The Life of Grace, however, possesses in itself the Divine Life, and will therefore throw off in the course of time all that militates against it. Truth perdures. There will be moments of high drama, but, eventually, it must necessarily prevail. It is the way in which grace acts in the organic development of nature, the very reverse of the gnostic ‘time is greater than space’.
My dear fellow-believers in Christ Jesus our Lord, this false spirit shall not, cannot ultimately prevail. In the 16th Century, the Protestant revolt demoted Marriage from a sacrament, and set in train the secularisation of marriage in the West. Constantinople began to lose its purchase on the accuracy of the Gospel of marriage with the Emperor Justinian and his Roman civil law of divorce. As the scandalous example of adulterous Emperors and Empresses remarried in the lifetime of their true spouses filtered down into the Church and became the custom, so a fair-seeming theology of oikonomia grew up to cloak this grave breach with holy Tradition. This is what Häring, Kasper and co, in their ignorant folly, have been invoking as an example for us to follow. Only till now did the Catholic Church in communion with Rome hold fast the Dominical and Apostolic teaching on the sacramentality and indissolubility of Christian marriage. I qualify that: you should study the recent history of the Coptic Church on this issue: it is most inspiring and encouraging. Let us take the Copts for our allies, in this and in other ways too.
Is it still a possibility, the Cardinals’ proposed fraternal
correction of the Pope? We heard of this last November, and it surely lifted
our beleaguered spirits. But now it is the end of April, and nothing has come
of it. I cannot help but think of that passage from Shakespeare: There is a
tide in the affairs of men…, and wonder if the tide has come and gone, and we
the lay faithful are left stranded again.
Yet Cardinal Burke has recently said: “Until these questions
are answered, there continues to spread a very harmful confusion in the Church,
and one of the fundamental questions is in regards to the truth that there are
some acts that are always and everywhere wrong, what we call intrinsically evil
acts, and so, we cardinals, will continue to insist that we get a response to
these honest questions.” (8)
Well, I hope so, dear Cardinals, I hope so. We the faithful,
beg you: forget about calculating prudent outcomes. Real prudence should tell
you when it is the right time for courageous witness, whose other name is
martyrdom.
Pope Francis will not heed any fraternal correction, as John
XXII once did. But you know what? It would not matter much even if he did
publish some statement along those lines. Let one 24 hour news-cycle go by, and
we had better not count on it that further utterances do not subtly undercut or
openly contradict what was said the day before. If we have not learnt that
about his manner by now, then we truly are the stupidest of sheep—or shepherds,
as the case may be. Pardon me if I venture to say this, but, however we account
for it, the papacy is not working right now in the Church. Until we face this
reality, unbelievable as it may seem, we are bound in intimidation and
illusion, and the way out that the Lord would open up for us will be deferred.
What kind of prophet do you want to show you the times? Hananiah or Jeremiah?
Choose.
What then is the plight of us the lay faithful in these days
of severe trial in the Church? I could hardly better the following comment, to
an article by the honourable and courageous struggler, Steve Skojec, on 1P5.
Pray for Steve and his family. The author of the comment is Roderick Halvorsen
from Santa, Idaho. He came into the Catholic Church from Protestantism some
years ago, and has no intention of leaving, but sees the follies of liberal
Protestantism metastasizing in the Catholic Church. He speaks here of us, the
lay faithful: "But in reality, God is testing us. He is asking us to
be in relationship with HIM, yes, personally and intimately and truly. He has
taken all the “crutches” of Catholicism away; the power, the glory, the world’s
respect, trustworthy leaders and models, in short, all the stuff that can be of
assistance to the faith, but is unnecessary to the faith, and like wealth and
worldly success, can be the source of a weakening of our faith, when we begin
to shift our trust to the “culture” of the faith, instead of to the person of
our faith: Jesus Christ." (9)
Jesus answered, and said to him: If anyone loves me, he will
keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make
our abode with him. (John 14:23). To this abode, this abiding, this being
hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3), therefore, we must go.
In the midst of social, cultural and ecclesial collapse, it
is a wonderful thing, but I see signs of a common cause between monasticism and
the lay faithful who are seeking this interior abiding with Christ. Rod
Dreher’s the Benedict Option that appeared a few weeks ago, attests this
movement. For not in efficient political programs, but ‘below radar’ so to
speak, in the humble life of community ordered in Christ, monastic communities
quietly established advance outposts of a new liturgical universe in the rubble
of the western Roman empire. In other ways too, the lay faithful, and I have in
mind especially the domestic churches of families, sense the worsening crises
of these times, and intuit that for them the way of spiritual contest is in the
local community, in the small, the hidden, the unimportant in this world’s
eyes. They have little or no role in the ecclesiastical world, or perhaps in
worldly success either. Such seekers hunger for an alternative liturgy of life
and community, prayer and work, and some of them are sensing that deep
monasticism has a word for them. A dear friend in the John Paul II Institute in
Melbourne, sadly soon to close, Conor Sweeney, likes to use the hobbits in
Tolkien’s mythology as an analogy for this hidden alternative Christian
lifestyle. For it was the hobbits, an insignificant folk, who had no part in
the counsels of the mighty, who against all odds had the decisive role in
overturning the powerful forces of the dark Lord threatening to engulf the
whole of Middle Earth in a reign of savagery.
I have another friend, Michael Ryan, a married man and
father, whose shining light of inspiration among the saints is St Bruno.
Imagine it, the witness of the most intentionally contemplative monastic life
in the Western Church, the Carthusians, a beacon of hope to the lay faithful?
For deep monasticism is all about moné, ‘abode’ or ‘abiding’ in Christ, about
waiting and watching with hope-filled faith, as ‘useful’ as the Prophet
Habbakuk standing upon his watch and stationing himself on the watchtower, as ‘useful’
as Simeon and Anna haunting the temple and waiting their life long for the
dawning light of salvation and knowing him when he came, as ‘useful’ as the
women who sat at a distance and watched at our Lord’s tomb on the eve of the
first Good Friday, as ‘useful’ as our all-holy Lady, Mary, taking her stand
beside the Cross.
Perhaps prayer, prayer of this sort, is the most radically
political act of all, and the very core of Christianity? Where O where have we
Catholics been?
Our Lord himself used to rise long before dawn and watch in
the night hours, even in the days of his busiest ministry. The disciples, awed
one day by the mystery of his prayer, felt a deep wistful attraction: Lord,
teach us to pray. This is the one emulous desire that we do need: Jesus, the
one model to whose imitation we can give ourselves completely, and we will not
be betrayed. Can we, is it at all possible to learn something of the sentiments
that filled his human mind and heart in those solitary hours of intimacy with
his Father? Yes we can, for in his great compassion he shared them with us in a
form of words: sacred words, holy words of complete trustworthy power and
truth:
Abba! Abbuna de b’ashmayo, yithqaddash shm’okh.
Our Father, who are in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name…
Rome, April 22, 2017
*
(1) Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition
(London: Routledge 2003), 13.
(2) Above all he encouraged his priests not to deny
communion to anyone, whether they be married, or cohabiting, or divorced and
remarried. With no fuss and without making this decision public, the
then-archbishop of Buenos Aires was already doing what the popes at the time
prohibited, but he would later permit once he became pope.
—Sandro Magister, ‘The Man who had to be elected
Pope’, http://www.onepeterfive.com/man-elected-... accessed Wednesday,
April 5, 2017
(3) Relatio Synodi 2014, #52.
(4) https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pope-n...
(5) See Deacon Jim Russell, ‘Pope Francis ‘Time is greater
than Space’: What does it mean?’, , ‘http://aleteia.org/2016/05/24/pope-francis-time-is-greater-than-space-what-does-it-mean/
(6) http://www.onepeterfive.com/pope-speakin... Friday,
7 April 2017
(7) Super Matthaeum, Cap. V, l. 2. The original
statement is: ‘Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.’
(8) From https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/03/27/b...
(9) ‘RTHEVR’ from the comments to “Archbishop of Malta
Claims Fidelity to Pope on Exhortation Guidelines”, Steve Skojec, February 20,
2017, http://www.onepeterfive.com/archbishop-o... accessed Wednesday, February
22, 2017.
