HAS FRANCIS SPLIT THE CHURCH?

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the authors' AND DO NOT REPRESENT GENE'S VIEWS .

Under a hard rain and a sea of colorful umbrellas in St. Peter’s Square on March 13, 2013, the Catholic church changed its guard with the election of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first pope ever to take the name Francis.
The 77-year-old was elected as the 266th man to lead the Roman Catholic Church through secret burned ballots in an archaic, ritualistic conclave, but it was clear from the start that his election was nothing short of revolutionary.
He was elected after the shocking resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the first such living-pope transition in more than 400 years. Francis is the first pope from Latin America, the first Jesuit and the first non-European to hold the position since the 8th century.

His personal choices sent strong messages. By refusing the usual gold cross popes are expected to wear and opting for simple silver instead, he made it clear that the days of high living and big spending by the church elite were over.

By making sure his black pants showed through his white papal cassock to remind people he was still a priest, he made the point that he wanted his bishops and cardinals to focus on ministry, not job titles or “clericalism,” which he said early on was the bane of the church’s existence.
Pope Francis

While Benedict wore red Prada slippers, Francis opted for the same soft leather loafers he’d been pounding the pavement of Buenos Aires with for decades. He paid his own hotel bill, carried his own satchel, and he opted for a room in the Santa Marta residence among the nuns and visiting clergy inside Vatican City over the apostolic apartments overlooking St. Peter’s Square.
His first apostolic voyage was to the island of Lampedusa to draw attention to migrants and refugees, which has been a cornerstone of his papacy despite a global shift towards building walls and bolstering border controls. He even suggested that the then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump was “not a Christian” for promising to build a wall on the Mexican border.

Pope Francis greeting the crowd from the popemobile

He made quick friends and even quicker enemies with his attempts to reform the archaic curia, replacing career clerics in top positions with moderate representatives from the global church. But what angers the conservatives, who have run the church with an iron fist and a blind eye for so long, is how he has bent the rules.
He made gays feel more welcome than any pontiff in the past, ditching language like “intrinsically disordered” to describe homosexuality for his now infamous “who am I to judge?” response when he was asked about a devout priest who happened to be gay. He suggested divorced and remarried Catholics could take communion and he allowed repentant women to ask forgiveness for having abortions.

Pope Francis is greeted as he arrives for his weekly general audience, in the Pope Paul VI hall, at the Vatican, Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2017

For a time, it seemed like the Francis way would win. But conservative Catholics, led by American conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, have been making ground, openly questioning his authority and filing a formal complaint known as dubia with the Roman Curia about his alleged missteps on doctrine.

Someone even plastered the streets of Rome with ugly posters questioning his motives. More recently, there have been calls for his own resignation over his alleged indifference to clerical sex abuse.
Pope Francis celebrates a Mass in Genoa, Italy, Saturday, May 27, 2017

© getty Pope Francis celebrates a Mass in Genoa, Italy, Saturday, May 27, 2017

There was a brief moment early on in his papacy when it looked like he might unite the church as a devout outsider who could somehow bridge the gap between the faithful and their fathers. Now, more than five years into his papacy, he leads a church crippled by systemic clerical sex abuse scandals and which has never been more divided.
Insiders say Francis’s church is one step away from a schism and Francis, who often errs on the side of silence and is prone to mixed messaging, has seen his approval rating plummet in recent months, according to recent Gallup polls.

Still, everything that led to his election in 2013, from Benedict’s shocking resignation to his hands-on and often controversial approach, has changed the church in ways yet too soon to measure.

Pope Francis’ teaching has ‘split’ the Church: Philosopher

amoris laetitia, catholic, pope francis, robert spaemann

October 4, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis’ 2016 exhortation on marriage and family has already “split” the Catholic Church, causing division among bishops and marginalizing priests, a prominent German Catholic philosopher said.

“The split within the Church concerning Amoris Laetitia (AL) has already taken place,” said Professor Robert Spaemann in an interview with OnePeterFive’s Maike Hickson. “Different bishops’ conferences have published contradictory guidelines. And the poor priests are left alone,” he added.

Spaemann, a former member of the Pontifical Academy for Life and long-time friend of Pope Emeritus Benedict, discussed during the interview Dr. Joseph Seifert’s removal from a Spanish university for having criticized the pope’s teaching in AL. He also discussed some of the other chilling effects the pope’s exhortation has had throughout the Catholic Church globally.

The philosopher related how an African priest recently visited him and tearfully shared the prospect the priest faces of suspension should he refuse Holy Communion to divorced and remarried Catholics living in habitual adultery.

“The Commandment ‘Thou shalt obey God more than man’ also applies to the teaching of the Church,” said Spaemann.

“If the priest is convinced that he may not give Holy Communion to the ‘divorced and remarried’ then he has to follow the word of Jesus and the 2,000-year-old teaching of the Church. If he is being suspended for it, he has become a ‘witness to the Truth,’” he added.

Spaemann said the Church’s doctrine prohibiting adultery is likely the most ignored today.

He urged Catholics, whether laity or priests facing the demand to give Communion to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, to remain faithful to the unchanging teaching and practice of the Church.

“Those priests, who would be now forced by their superiors to give Holy Communion to public and unrepentant adulterers, or to other notorious and public sinners, should answer them with a holy conviction,” said Spaemann, namely that ‘Our behavior is the behavior of the entire Catholic world throughout two thousand years.’”

When Spaemann, who grew up under National Socialism, was asked how he would advise Catholics in the current difficult state of the Church, he replied: “It was easier during Nazi times to be a faithful Christian than today.”

When Spaemann was asked if, as a philosopher, he agreed with the argument that new social changes must also bring forth a change of the moral laws, he answered in the negative. He adding that even should applications of the law change, “the principles of the moral law are always and everywhere the same.”

“If there exists a dominant view and that dominant view contradicts the moral law, the essence of man,” Spaemann said, “then the whole society is in a sorry state.”

'Unity...based upon the truth'

Spaemann related during the interview how he was shocked at Dr. Seifert’s removal from his teaching post. Archbishop Javier Martínez Fernández, bishop of Granada, Spain, removed Seifert — a close friend of the late Pope St. John Paul II — from his position at the International Academy of Philosophy in Granada in August after Seifert had published a critique of Pope Francis’ exhortation.

Spaemann criticized Archbishop Martinez’s claim that Seifert was confusing the faithful and undermining the Church’s unity.

“The unity of the Church is based upon the truth,” he said.

“What Seifert criticizes is the breach with the continuous teaching of the Church and with the explicit teachings of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II,” Spaemann said. “Saint John Paul once, in Veritatis Splendor, stressed, explicitly, that there is no exception to the rejection of the 'remarried' divorcees with regard to the Sacraments. Pope Francis contradicts the teaching of Veritatis Splendor just as explicitly.”

The philosopher said that the removal of Seifert has sent shockwaves to all Catholic centers of higher education.

“Every philosopher who works in an ecclesial institution now has to ask himself whether he can still continue his service there,” he said.

Not long after the April 2016 release of AL, Spaemann had said that changing the Church’s sacramental practice would be “a breach with its essential anthropological and theological teaching on human marriage and sexuality.”

“It is clear to every thinking person who knows the texts that are important in this context that [with Amoris Laetitia] there is a breach” with the Church’s Tradition, he said at that time.

Last December Spaemann said the four cardinals who had submitted the five yes-or-no questions (dubia) to Pope Francis for clarification on AL had chosen the right path. He said it was deplorable that only four cardinals had done so.

Spaemann said that the Church’s magisterium was “debased” by Pope Francis’ refusal to answer the four cardinals.

Will Pope Francis Cause a Schism in the Catholic Church?

In his new book, “To Change the Church,” the Times columnist Ross Douthat critiques the Pontiff.

By Vinson Cunningham

Illustration by Javier Jaén; photograph from iStock / Getty

Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

For the better part of the past two years, Catholics around the world have been fighting over a footnote. In April, 2016, Pope Francis, after leading two synods devoted to “the vocation and mission of the family in the Church and in the contemporary world,” published a teaching document titled “Amoris Laetitia,” or “The Joy of Love.” Tucked away in the eighth chapter of the text is footnote 351, which corresponds to an anodyne-sounding sentence about the extent to which “mitigating factors” might affect a pastor’s handling of certain personal predicaments—such as divorce, followed by remarriage—that are considered sinful. Catholics who find themselves in such situations, the footnote explains, might be helped along by the very sacraments that their transgressions would typically bar them from receiving. Communion “is not a prize for the perfect,” Francis writes, “but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
For Pope Francis’s progressive supporters, this was the latest sign of a pastoral tendency toward inclusiveness and mercy. For his more traditionalist critics, it was a direct threat to the Catholic injunction against divorce, about which Jesus was brutally clear, in the Book of Matthew: “Whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful), and marries another, commits adultery.” Catholic doctrine holds that marriage is an “indissoluble” ontological state, and that, for this reason, Communion is not extended to those who violate it. A few weeks after the release of “Amoris Laetitia,” the German Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann said in an interview that footnote 351 could lead to “a schism that would not be settled on the peripheries, but rather in the heart of the Church.” He added, “May God forbid that from happening.”
Spaemann, a professor emeritus at the University of Munich, has close ties to Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict, born Joseph Ratzinger, was himself a German academic, and is the author of notable works of scholarship, including the 1968 book “Introduction to Christianity,” a much heralded explication of the faith. In 1977, Ratzinger became the archbishop of Munich and Freising, and then, in 1981, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, once upon a time, was called the Inquisition. As prefect, he served Pope John Paul II as a kind of theologian-in-chief, and was known, on occasion, to gently correct even the Pontiff. Ratzinger was elected Pope, in 2005, after the death of John Paul, but continued to devote himself to scholarship; in addition to the sermons and encyclicals that are the ordinary literary duty of that office, he found time to compose and publish “Jesus of Nazareth,” a three-volume work on the life of Christ. He was not a popularizer of the faith, as John Paul was, or as Francis would become; he was a writer. And he became, over time, a living metaphor for the way in which an emphasis on a religion’s textual dimensions can act both as an agent of clarity and as a bulwark against change.
Then, in 2013, Benedict committed one of the more radical acts in recent Catholic history: he resigned. The last voluntary papal resignation had occurred in 1294, soon after the hermit Pietro Angelerio was made Pope Celestine V, as a sort of cosmic joke. Angelerio had written angrily to an assembly of cardinals, in the midst of a two-year impasse in naming a new Pope, warning them that they would incur God’s wrath if it lasted any longer. The cardinals’ response was to drag the monk out of seclusion and fit him for white robes. He stayed in office just long enough to declare the Pope’s right to abdicate and to avail himself of that option. Dante is said to have written Celestine into the Inferno; according to this theory, he’s the anonymous figure in Hell’s antechamber “who due to cowardice made the great refusal.” No new Pope has named himself Celestine in the centuries since. He hardly offered a sparkling precedent for Benedict’s decision.
Francis’s tenure has made clearer every day that the resignation would mean a departure from at least the recent past. Francis, who is eighty-one, recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of his ascension to the office, but he still seems fundamentally new. After the conclave that culminated in his election, on the way to his inaugural Mass at the Sistine Chapel, he made sure to be photographed handling his own baggage, looking more like a tourist or a pilgrim than a Pontiff. He opted for simple black shoes, in pointed contrast to Benedict’s red leather numbers. Even his chosen name—he’s the first Pope to name himself Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi, and the first Pope in more than a millennium to choose a name that had not been chosen before—hinted at a radical simplicity. He has not written the sort of scholarly tracts for which Benedict will be remembered, but he has produced “Happiness in This Life” (Random House), a collection of peppy one-liners, almost self-helpish in tone, culled from his encyclicals and sermons. “There is one word that I want to say to you: joy! ” Francis declares. “Never be sad, men and women: A Christian should never be sad! Never let yourself be discouraged!”
Francis seems less intent on altering the Church’s most controversial doctrines than on exhibiting boredom with the whole angst-ridden discourse that surrounds them. When he was asked about footnote 351, shortly after “Amoris Laetitia” was published, he said that he couldn’t remember it. Earlier in his papacy, while fielding questions from the Vatican press corps on a plane, he was asked about the Church’s stance on homosexuality. He replied, “Who am I to judge?” It sounded more like a plea to move past the issue than like an actual invocation of humility. (After all, when it comes to society’s market-driven indifference to the poor, or even to Francis’s pet theological causes, such as devotion to the Virgin Mary, he is not shy about offering judgments.) Francis quickly became popular in the press, and among liberal non-Catholics. After the worst years of the clerical-abuse crisis in the Church, here was a leader who embodied Catholicism’s lastingly positive, if comparatively abstract, associations. (Few of us imagine ourselves as opposed to love, mercy, and human dignity.) He sounded willing, even eager, to leave the less comfortable conversations—about divorce, contraception, homosexuality—behind.
But the appeal of the institution of the Papacy, for many, lies in its promise of constancy. According to Catholic teaching, the office was created when Christ named the apostle Peter the first leader of the Church, saying, in a pun on the Greek meaning of Peter’s name, “Upon this rock will I build my church.” The more impressive the edifice you’d like to build, the more important a stable base becomes. Today, under Francis, and in the wake of Benedict’s resignation—he is now Pope Emeritus, a title that has never existed before—the Papacy has become the site for unexpected shifts and discontinuities. Hence, in part, the fierce reactions of Francis’s critics, some of whom, like Spaemann, have come to understand the clash over “Amoris” as a crisis. In becoming implicitly more amenable to divorce—and, by extension, to other ills of the wider culture—the Church, they worry, might cease, permanently, in any recognizable way, to be itself.

This unsettling state of affairs is the subject of “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism” (Simon & Schuster), a new book by the conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat. As the controversy over “Amoris Laetitia” has grown, the thirty-eight-year-old Douthat has become perhaps the most prominent lay critic of Francis’s papacy. In that unofficial capacity, he has duelled in print, in public conversations, and, often, on Twitter, with many of Francis’s defenders, including Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest and journalist who is thought to be one of the Pope’s closest confidants outside the Vatican. Almost uniquely among mainstream commentators, Douthat has been willing to suggest the possibility that Francis will spark a genuine schism between liberals and conservatives. His previous book, on the quirky diversity—and, in his view, the errancy—of Christianity in America, is titled “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.” In “To Change the Church,” one sometimes senses a barely constrained wish to apply the H-word to Francis himself—a wish suppressed only, perhaps, by a last shred or two of institutional deference.

The book opens, oddly, with an extended meditation on Douthat’s own religious history and on the mixture of sensibilities that, he admits, might color, or even compromise, his assessment of “Amoris” and the Pope. Douthat was born into Protestantism, wobbling along the seldom-travelled border between Pentecostal fire and the polite mainstream. He converted to Catholicism as a teen-ager, freely but under the influence of his spiritually itinerant mother. “So in the world of cradle Catholics and adult converts, groups that are often contrasted with one another and occasionally find themselves at odds, I belong to the little-known third category in between,” he explains. He casts his life as a Christian as similarly divided—often doubtful and ironic where others seem, to him, naturally pious and enviably prone to untroubled belief. “Sometimes I felt as though my conversion was incomplete, awaiting some further grace or transformation,” he writes. “At others I felt that I belonged to a category of Catholics that used to be common in Catholic novels . . . the good bad Catholic or the bad good one, whose loyalty was stronger than his faith and whose faith was stronger than his practice, but who didn’t want the church to change all the rules to make his practice easier because then what would really be the point?”

The story of Francis’s papacy is in part a regional story: prelates from wealthier European countries, where ancient cathedrals increasingly sit empty, have, in their eagerness to encourage congregants to return, been more likely to support the liberal interpretations of “Amoris.” Meanwhile, representatives of the newly dynamic Church in the global South—especially Africa, where Catholicism is in a pitched battle with charismatic and, often, prosperity-promising denominations—have hewed to traditionalism. (The German Benedict and the Latin-American Francis occupy ironic positions in this divide; Benedict is something of an anomaly among his countrymen, and the brashness of Francis, the Argentine son of Italian immigrants, may stem in part from his upbringing in a place in which, at the time, Catholicism still amounted to a total culture.) Douthat notes these divisions, but refrains, amid his other confessions, from turning the geographic mirror on himself. The American Church is proportionally smaller, and more embattled, than many of its counterparts elsewhere; for years, immigration has been its sole source of consistent growth. And our country’s rapidly fragmenting political and cultural landscape casts frightening shadows when held up against a Church that continues its choppy engagement with an increasingly irreligious West.

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

April 16, 2018

“I can tell when you’re just kissing me to get some of my lip balm, Josh.”

At first blush, the Church might appear to be as plagued by splintering as so much of American life is: besides the rough liberal-conservative divide that, in its current form, has persisted since the sixties, there are also Catholic socialists, Catholic Trumpists, liberation theologians, liturgical traditionalists lamenting the loss of the old Latin Mass, and ultramontane restorationists who hint at their hopes for a return to theocracy—and who, by implication, dismiss both liberals and conservatives as modernists who have been led astray by pluralistic democracy, and by the false hope of convergence with the wider world.
But these factions are, ideally, united by a sense of eschatology via history: a hope that they are all journeying, however imperfectly, together, toward God. These days, this would seem to constitute a major point of attraction, especially to a certain kind of politically interested American spiritual seeker. In the secular realm, we carry out our arguments—and develop our politics, each of us an autodidact—without the benefit of a common moral language or the bedrock of shared premises, and we sometimes appear fated, therefore, to retreat to our various ideological corners for good. The Catholicism of a figure like Benedict, with his faith in the legibility of earthly and spiritual experience, presents a salve for this condition. Its adherents might squabble, but their differences lead them back, eventually, to a mutual inheritance: the words of Jesus in the Gospels, the lives of the saints, the rhythms of the liturgy, the catechism of the Church. This common ground might not prompt agreement, but it can result in understanding, and in something like harmony. One of my favorite genres of Catholic literature is the book-length interview: the Pope or some other high-ranking churchman sits down with a reporter or other layman, both operating on the assumption that conversation tends toward truth. (Francis has participated in more than one of these books; the most recent was just published in Italy, under the title “God Is Young.”)
In his most effective columns for the Times, Douthat, a staunch social conservative who nonetheless manages to project a tone of Gen X knowingness and mild ennui, is not so much an ideological champion or purveyor of contrarian opinion as a cunning interpreter. As the Times’ Op-Ed section has become the subject of internecine media controversy, largely over the quality and the usefulness of its conservative contributorship, Douthat stands as the cleverest and least predictable writer there. He means to persuade—or, at least, to subtly reroute the grooves of reasoning by which his wary readers arrive at their reliably liberal positions. But he usually tries to do so by breezing past the most radical implications of his ideas. In one recent column, he offered a rationale for why liberals should welcome a nativist like the White House policy staffer and speechwriter Stephen Miller at the table of the immigration debate, presenting several benign-sounding arguments for Miller’s pretty gross position on the subject without ever letting slip whether he shares it.
He isn’t so coy in “To Change the Church”—the sincerity of his alarm with respect to Francis won’t allow it. But the book’s best chapters are vehicles for his genuine understanding of more liberal co-religionists, and for his ability to parrot their most compelling arguments, skewing them nearly imperceptibly on the way to chopping them down. One of his signature rhetorical maneuvers is to render, in as plain and unmocking a manner as possible, two partisan stories about—or, as the liberal slur goes, “both sides” of—a given phenomenon or event, and then to clear a path through the middle, revealing the gulf between them to be the result of virtually irreconcilable patterns of thought. In one impressive and quietly comic section of “To Change the Church,” he recounts the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council three times, from three points of view, setting exaggerated tribal grievances next to details of undeniable truth, as if slowly turning over events in order to find an acceptably clean ground for conversation.
His third version of the Vatican II story, the one he considers to be closest to the truth, presents a dialectic. The council, which took place from 1962 to 1965, produced, under the guidance of, first, Pope John XXIII, and then Pope Paul VI, a new framework for Catholic engagement with modernity. Amity between the Church and other denominations, as well as non-Christian religions, was encouraged; the legacy of Catholic anti-Semitism was roundly denounced; it became licit, for the first time, to celebrate the liturgy in vernacular languages, instead of in Latin. Suddenly—according to liberals, who regard John XXIII as a hero—the doors of the Church were open as never before. But John Paul II and Benedict sought to dispel any notion of an ecclesial revolution, and, during their papacies, conservative Catholics largely accepted their argument that Vatican II was completely compatible with the doctrinal dispensations that had preceded it. Progressives retreated, hoping for a liberal Pontiff to arrive soon and revive the world-embracing Vatican II spirit.
The fear that Douthat expresses in “To Change the Church” is that Francis’s foray into theological innovation with “Amoris” threatens to drag these unresolved tensions into the light—and, perhaps, to aggravate them beyond repair. The book is characteristically well written, and makes impressive use of theological crises from centuries past in order to contextualize Francis in the long, often fractious sweep of Catholic history. But at Douthat’s moments of greatest alarm, he seems determined to set aside the surprises, the reversals, and the lingering irresolution that one finds in that history. Francis, he complains throughout the book, is too often ambiguous; Douthat believes that the ambiguity is strategic, a way to mask a subterranean desire to change Catholicism for good. In the Church’s past, however, uncertainty has sometimes been the rule for decades, even centuries, before its ancient teachings have groped their way into coherence with the cultures and the times at hand. Francis appears cognizant that his turn at the helm comes at such a tenuous moment—the abuse scandal and Benedict’s resignation insured as much—and he appears determined to keep his balance for as long as tension persists.
In his position at the Times, Douthat is an essentially, if covertly, evangelistic writer, and he is most convincing when his tone is irenic, funny, and self-deprecating, and when he is willing to trade small, stubborn differences for broader agreements—when, in other words, he most closely resembles Francis. Both hope to win a soul or two, and both come across as willing, given their surroundings, to make a few compromises in the winning. Sounding briefly Benedictine in the preface, Douthat says that his book “is conservative, in the sense that it assumes the church needs a settled core of doctrine, a clear unbroken link to the New Testament and the early church, for Catholicism’s claims and structure and demands to make any sense at all.” But Douthat’s proposed solutions to the crisis, like his historical analyses and his disposition, are more pragmatic than truly traditionalist. He suggests more than once, for instance, that the worldwide Church might perhaps follow the American Church’s lead in widening access to annulments and in speeding up the process for obtaining them. The functional reality would be roughly the same as that expressed by the new Franciscan paradigm—people moving from one set of marriage vows to another, receiving Communion at both the start and the end of the journey—but the surrounding forms would be stable enough to claim continuity. Douthat often sounds like a symptom of the dissonances that Francis seeks to resolve.

In February, Benedict, who will soon turn ninety-one, wrote to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, announcing that he was on a “pilgrimage towards Home.” The impression of Benedict as a scholar-ascetic, hunched over a stack of papers, writing or reading or lost in a moment of prayer, has deepened during the five years since his abdication of the Petrine throne and his scrupulously kept vow to allow his successor to rule without fear of contradiction. In March, the Vatican published an eleven-book series, by eleven different authors, titled “The Theology of Pope Francis,” and its head of communications, Monsignor Dario Viganò, revealed, at a press conference, that he had asked Benedict to offer his thoughts, in the form of “a page or a page and a half of dense theology in his clear and punctual style.” Benedict declined, writing a short letter, a photograph of which Viganò presented to the public—a page of type, under Benedict’s terse letterhead: “Benedict XVI, Papa emeritus.” In the picture, only one paragraph is legible; it contains a rebuke to those who place stock in the opposing caricatures of the two Popes—Benedict as cloistered academic and Francis as untutored operator—and insists on a deeper “interior continuity” between their papacies.
Benedict is surely right to push back against those depictions. For all Francis’s facility with symbols and grand gestures, he has not instituted a break from Church teaching but, rather, a shift in focus from text to practice, from household rules to daily life. He is not, as some of his most strident critics have implied, indifferent to doctrine; it is more that his emphases, and his cryptic silences, have helped coax into view an ideal long cherished by liberal—and, often, lapsed—Catholics: a Church whose appeal lies in its engagement with, and not its retreat from, the wider world. It is unclear whether Francis sees himself in this light. Sometimes he seems to be a figure of convenience for political and cultural élites who have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to marshal his universalist message against the recent global upswing of nativist-nationalist political sentiment—while, at the same time, and mostly successfully, resisting or ignoring his critiques of modern technology and economics.
The Vatican presented Benedict’s letter as an endorsement of Francis, delivered at a moment of growing conservative criticism, but it soon became clear that something was amiss. Reporters from the Associated Press noticed that the bottom two lines on the page in the photograph were slightly blurred, and that the entire second page of the letter was nowhere to be seen. After an outcry from the media and from members of the Church, the rest of the text, in Italian, was released. Benedict’s diplomacy, it turned out, wasn’t so complete. He had expressed disappointment at the inclusion in the series of a theologian who had previously directed “anti-papist” attacks at him, and he revealed that he hadn’t read the books at all. Amid the ensuing rancor over the deception, Viganò resigned.
The episode, almost slapstick in its clumsiness, evoked the persistent, if mostly marginal, murmurings of some reactionaries that Benedict remains the true Pope, having been manipulated into resigning by a corrupt—and, in the most conspiratorial accounts, largely gay—Vatican bureaucracy that was fed up with his fealty to doctrine. The truth, by most reasonable tellings, is less sensational: Benedict was at John Paul II’s side as he slid into helplessness in the years before his death, and saw the disorientation that a dying Pope could sow among his flock. The Church is still foundering from the sexual-abuse crisis, and, in his final years, Benedict didn’t trust himself to steer the faithful past the shoals. Francis has not inspired much more confidence on that score: he has tended to be dismissive of, and sometimes even hostile toward, the critics of bishops and other prelates who enabled decades of wicked behavior. The problem of priestly abuse might indeed be the sturdiest link between Francis and Benedict—and a lingering reminder that what has most grievously afflicted the Church in recent decades came not from the outer world, but from within. ♦

Pope Francis and the Footnote That Could Split the Catholic Church

April 11, 2016 | Trevin Wax

Immagine-k12G-U107095816044700C-1024x576@LaStampa.it

What could a Protestant – even more, a Baptist – have to say about Pope Francis’ new exhortation on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia? I feel the irony in reading and commenting on a papal document on the same day I am heading to a conference whose theme is “We Are Protestant.”
But I believe it is important for us to keep an eye on Roman Catholicism’s doctrinal developments and pastoral application in part because, whether we like it or not, the pope is the face for Catholicism, and Catholicism is, globally speaking, the most visible face for Christianity as a religion. Which means that, even for those of us who reject the office of the papacy and are at odds with Catholic teaching on a number of essential points of doctrine (most importantly, the doctrine of justification by faith alone), the pope’s exposition of Catholic teaching on marriage, children, and the family will be discussed as if it is the Christian position on these matters.
Thankfully, when it comes to marriage and family, there is considerable overlap between Catholics and evangelicals, most notably on issues related to the gift of gender and male-female complementarity as essential to marriage. There are also some important differences: evangelicals do not believe marriage to be a sacrament or that the union is indissoluble. Most evangelicals freely welcome repentant divorced and remarried couples to the Lord’s Table and accept the legitimacy of some forms of birth control forbidden by the Church.
So, when it comes to internal squabbles over Catholic teaching and practice, conservative evangelicals are in an awkward position. Because we disagree with the papacy and with Catholic doctrine in a number of places, our differences with Catholicism are usually more profound and foundational than the disagreements between conservative and progressive Catholics. On some contested issues, we disagree with the most conservative of Catholics, and yet strangely enough, don’t want the Church to change its teaching because we hold precious many of the other truths that Catholic teaching on marriage protects. We worry that change in one area might eventually jeopardize other, more foundational doctrines.

The Background for Catholic Controversy

That leads us to one of the most pressing issues in the Catholic Church today. Some bishops have advocated for a change in doctrine regarding the indissolubility of marriage, to allow divorced and remarried couples to partake of the Eucharist. Other bishops have pushed back against such an idea, partly because it poses a direct challenge to the internal consistency of Catholic teaching throughout the centuries, and because it would imply that second and third marriages (while the previous spouses are still living) are acceptable in the eyes of the Church.
You need to understand the ongoing debate about admitting remarried couples to the Eucharist if you’re going to understand the controversy surrounding Francis’ recent apostolic exhortation. From the outset in Amoris Laetitia, Francis makes clear that he is trying to steer a middle way. He shuns people who have “an immoderate desire for total change without sufficient reflection or grounding” as well as the “attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations.” In other words, he’s saying, “I’ve got liberals on the left and fundamentalists on the right. I’m choosing a middle road.”
That middle road looks like this: Francis will uphold historic Catholic teaching, while cracking open the door for freedom among local priests making pastoral decisions. Throughout the document, he pits pastoral compassion against doctrinal fidelity, as if one gets in the way of the other. And he pushes change by sliding a footnote under the door, a footnote that could lead to greater divisions in the Catholic Church. (More on that below…)
Here’s what I’m going to do in this lengthy post. I’m going to summarize and quote from some of the most important parts of the document. At the end, I’m going to get to the most controversial aspect (including that footnote). If you want to skip the summary, go to the bottom of this post.

Why Marriage is In Trouble

Much of this exhortation is devoted to explaining the trends that make it harder to enter into and sustain healthy marriages today. At times, Francis sounds like Charles Taylor, the philosopher who coined the phrase “The Age of Authenticity” as an apt description of Western Culture. Francis writes why ‘authenticity’ is both good and bad:

“We rightly value a personalism that opts for authenticity as opposed to mere conformity. While this can favour spontaneity and a better use of people’s talents, if misdirected it can foster attitudes of constant suspicion, fear of commitment, self-centredness and arrogance. Freedom of choice makes it possible to plan our lives and to make the most of ourselves. Yet if this freedom lacks noble goals or personal discipline, it degenerates into an inability to give oneself generously to others.” (para. 33)

Next, Francis explains what this view of authenticity does to our vision of marriage:

“When these factors affect our understanding of the family, it can come to be seen as a way station, helpful when convenient, or a setting in which rights can be asserted while relationships are left to the changing winds of personal desire and circumstances. Ultimately, it is easy nowadays to confuse genuine freedom with the idea that each individual can act arbitrarily, as if there were no truths, values and principles to provide guidance, and everything were possible and permissible. The ideal of marriage, marked by a commitment to exclusivity and stability, is swept aside whenever it proves inconvenient or tiresome. The fear of loneliness and the desire for stability and fidelity exist side by side with a growing fear of entrapment in a relationship that could hamper the achievement of one’s personal goals.” (para. 34)

Here, Francis has put his finger on the cultural trends that make marriage difficult in our age. “To believe that we are good simply because ‘we feel good’ is a tremendous illusion,” he writes (para. 145). Because of these cultural developments, divorce is widespread.

“It is becoming more and more common to think that, when one or both partners no longer feel fulfilled, or things have not turned out the way they wanted, sufficient reason exists to end the marriage. Were this the case, no marriage would last.” (para. 237)

The Christian Doctrine of Marriage

The response to these challenges is to uphold the beauty of Christian teaching on marriage, a move that should cheer conservatives in the Church. Marriage mirrors the Trinitarian God (para. 11, 29, 121) and is a public institution with benefits for the world (para. 31, 131, 181, 184).
Birth Control
Amoris Laetitia reaffirms the Catholic prohibition of birth control, but it does so by showing the beautiful openness to life inherent in this teaching:

“From the outset, love refuses every impulse to close in on itself; it is open to a fruitfulness that draws it beyond itself. Hence no genital act of husband and wife can refuse this meaning, even when for various reasons it may not always in fact beget a new life.” (para. 80)

Abortion
On abortion, Francis urges us to consider the value of the embryo and to see new life with the “eyes of God” (para. 170):

“Here I feel it urgent to state that, if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the ‘property’ of another human being.” (para. 83)

Same-Sex Marriage
Not surprisingly, the document contains multiple wholesale rejections of the idea that same-sex unions are marriages. “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family,” he writes (para. 251). He worries about the “legal deconstruction of the family” in many countries, and the rise of models “based almost exclusively on the autonomy of the individual will” (para 53), and he decries the pressure exerted by international bodies that would make financial aid to poor countries “dependent on the introduction of laws to establish ‘marriage’ between persons of the same sex” (para. 251).
Even so, Francis believes that “every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence” (para. 250).
Transgender Ideology
Francis connects marriage and family by reaffirming the right of every child to “receive love from a mother and a father” (para. 172), because “the clear and well-defined presence of both figures, female and male, creates the environment best suited to the growth of the child” (para. 175). That emphasis on “male and female” is clear in his outright rejection of the ideology of the Transgender movement as well as its legal agenda:

“Yet another challenge is posed by the various forms of an ideology of gender that denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family. This ideology leads to educational programmes and legislative enactments that promote a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female. Consequently, human identity becomes the choice of the individual, one which can also change over time… It is one thing to be understanding of human weakness and the complexities of life, and another to accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality. Let us not fall into the sin of trying to replace the Creator. We are creatures, and not omnipotent. Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.” (para. 56)

Freedom for Priests to Bend Church Teaching?

This document tries to steer a course between doctrinal faithfulness and pastoral compassion, and as I mentioned above, Francis often pits fidelity and compassion against each another. He warns about the “trap” of “wasting our energy in doleful laments” and advocates instead “new forms of missionary creativity” (para. 57). He urges patience and respect for people who are not living up to the ideal of Christianity’s vision of marriage, noting that “irregular unions” can have good features (para. 78). He asks pastors to “avoid judgments that do not take into account the complexity of various situations, and they are to be attentive, by necessity, to how people experience and endure distress because of their condition” (para. 79).
On the matter of divorced and remarried people, Francis reminds the Church that they remain part of the ‘ecclesial community,’ and deserving of care and counsel.

“The Christian community’s care of such persons is not to be considered a weakening of its faith and testimony to the indissolubility of marriage; rather, such care is a particular expression of its charity” (para. 243).

The key sections on “irregular” situations come near the end of the document. Francis decries the flaunting of “objective sin as if it were part of the Christian ideal” and calls for the conversion of such people, which indicates that anyone pushing for a wholesale change of Christian teaching on divorce, marriage, or same-sex unions, show themselves to be “separate from the community” (para. 297). (Not much hope here for revisionists captive to the Sexual Revolution’s ideology.)
But what of people who are divorced and civilly remarried? It’s clear that they can participate in the life of the Church, but can they partake of the Eucharist? That’s the crucial point where Francis pivots to local discretion.

“What is possible is simply a renewed encouragement to undertake a responsible personal and pastoral discernment of particular cases, one which would recognize that, since ‘the degree of responsibility is not equal in all cases’, the consequences or effects of a rule need not necessarily always be the same…” (para. 300).

Francis believes the “individual conscience needs to be better incorporated into the Church’s praxis.” In other words, patience with people who need their consciences to be better formed by the gospel, but openness to participate in all aspects of church life so as to bring them along to that greater formation.
In a footnote Francis adds:

“In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, ‘I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy’.”

Depending on future developments, that may be the footnote that splits the Catholic Church. I’m not a Catholic historian and don’t want to overstate the significance of this encyclical or this footnote, but stranger things have happened – like when the Eastern and Western Church split in 1054 over the “filioque clause” of the Nicene Creed. Of course, the East / West split involved many issues, dating back centuries, but the same is true today. There have been various fault lines in the Catholic Church for decades, and who knows? What if this particular footnote became the moral filioque of the 21st century, exposing existing fault lines and irreparably dividing the church?
Shortly thereafter, Francis writes:

“I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion. But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a Church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness, a Mother who, while clearly expressing her objective teaching, always does what good she can, even if in the process, her shoes get soiled by the mud of the street.”

Conclusion and Responses from Catholic Thinkers

Already, Catholics are reacting to this document, with some disappointed that Francis’ reforms don’t go further and others discouraged that his reforms only widen the split between traditionalists and liberals. As an evangelical, I’m keeping my ears attuned to this conversation and will occasionally link to commentaries and articles that show how Catholics are processing the new developments.
Below are a few responses from Catholic thinkers.
Ross Douthat, a Catholic columnist in the New York Times, describes liberal and conservative Catholic wings as co-existing in a “low-grade civil war” with a “tension between doctrine and practice, in which the church’s official teaching remains conservative even as the everyday life of Catholicism is shot through with disagreement, relativism, dissent.” In Douthat’s view, Pope Francis has reaffirmed this truce in a way that gives hope to the liberal wing.

This move means that the truce is still in effect, but its terms have distinctly changed. There is still a formal teaching that remarriage without an annulment is adultery, that adultery is a mortal sin, that people who persist in mortal sins should not receive communion. And there is no structure or system in church life that contradicts any of this. This much conservatives still have, and it’s enough to stave off a sense of immediate theological crisis.

But there is also now a new papal teaching: A teaching in favor of the truce itself. That is, the post-1960s separation between doctrine and pastoral practice now has a papal imprimatur, rather than being a state of affairs that popes were merely tolerating for the sake of unity. Indeed, for Pope Francis that separation is clearly a hoped-for source of renewal, revival and revitalization, rather than something that renewal or revival might enable the church to gradually transcend.

Again, this is not the clear change of doctrine, the proof of concept for other changes, that many liberal bishops and cardinals sought. But it is an encouragement for innovation on the ground, for the de facto changes that more sophisticated liberal Catholics believe will eventually render certain uncomfortable doctrines as dead letters without the need for a formal repudiation from the top.

Former priest James Carroll, writing in The New Yorker, sees this document as affirming his previous practice of using pastoral compassion as a way to defy the Church’s official teaching:

Priests like me, in counselling our fellow-Catholics, operated under the rubric of the so-called pastoral solution, which allowed us to quietly defy Vatican dogma when the situation seemed to call for it. In the confessional booth or the rectory parlor, we could encourage our parishioners to decide for themselves, by examining their own consciences, whether the doctrine of the Church applied to them in their particular circumstance…

Francis’s watchword is mercy, but mercy adheres, first, not in alterations of doctrine but in the new way that Catholics are invited to think of doctrine…

Pope Francis’s emphasis on mercy toward the divorced and remarried doesn’t only mean that those people will more freely partake of Communion. It also means that the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, however much it is still held up as an ideal, will not grip the moral imagination of the Church as it once did.

From Religious News Service, Cathy Grossman sums up a number of responses from different organizations and people.

Writing for Crux, Carl Olson believes the document starts strong but then unravels due to its own internal inconsistencies.

Conservative Catholic writer, George Weigel, believes the document upholds Catholic teaching and forbids a departure from that doctrine in practice:

As this discussion unfolds, it will be important to keep in mind that AL cites the Final Report of the 2015 Synod on the key point: that all pastoral accompaniment of the divorced and civilly remarried, including discernment of ways in which they can be better integrated into the life of the Catholic community, is to take place “according to the teaching of the Church” — which means, in this context, the Church’s settled teaching on indissolubility and on worthiness to receive holy communion. It will also be important to keep in mind, as this discussion continues, that the kind of pastoral accompaniment and discernment so strongly urged by Pope Francis is in fact what goes on in the Catholic parishes and dioceses with which I’m most familiar. There are exceptions, I’m sure, and I’ve heard my share of horror stories about unfeeling and incompetent priests — and they are horrific, and disgraceful. But the priests and bishops I know bend every possible effort to be sensitive to difficult situations, and to see how they might be resolved in ways that serve both mercy and truth.

GENE ... a voice in the wilderness

Friday 5 October 2018

HAS FRANCIS SPLIT THE CHURCH?