COMMENTARY: A decade on, Leo seems intent on recovering Francis’ vision of marriage and family rather than reheating the Communion debate.
This week Pope Leo will preside over a meeting of bishops to discuss the pastoral application of the post-synodal apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, which was promulgated on March 19, 2016.
After 10 years of reflection on this groundbreaking and controversial text, it seems to many that Pope Leo now wants to attempt a deeper discernment of Amoris that goes beyond the polemics that have marred its reception in the broader Church.
Specifically, the focus in the immediate aftermath of the text was on the question of Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. Amoris seemed to open the door to allowing for a softening of the Catholic Church’s Eucharistic discipline in this matter, granting to pastors, after a period of “accompaniment” with the couples in question, the power to allow such couples to receive Communion in certain, very limited, circumstances, such as when living as “brother and sister” would harm the bond of a marriage in which children are involved (footnote 329):
In such situations, many people, knowing and accepting the possibility of living ‘as brothers and sisters’ which the Church offers them, point out that if certain expressions of intimacy are lacking, ‘it often happens that faithfulness is endangered and the good of the children suffers.’
This pastoral softening is further reinforced in footnote 351, where Pope Francis notes that those who are living in an “objective” situation of sin may not be subjectively morally culpable due to mitigating factors, and that in such situations the Church can offer “help” to such individuals — a help that may even include access to the sacraments:
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’ (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 44). I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’ (ibid., 47).
This set off a firestorm of debate leading to the now-infamous dubia, in which four cardinals in September 2016 asked the Pope to clarify what he meant by these various statements. The word dubia refers to “doubts” caused by an alleged ambiguity of teaching for which the dubia sponsors were seeking clarification.
The Pope did not respond to the dubia as quickly as the cardinals wanted, and so they made their questions public. This then led to even more controversy, since to make such dubia requests public is unusual, to say the least, and seemed to many an open attempt at creating public pressure on the Pope to respond.
Regardless of what one thinks of these sections of Amoris or of the dubia, the sad result of the controversy was that the great bulk of the text of Amoris was largely ignored in the media reports and in most Catholic commentaries. This is a shame, since the text is in many ways a wonderful theological meditation on the importance of marriage and family. And within that reflection are affirmations of thoroughly traditional understandings of the sacramental significance of marriage and of its essentially indissoluble nature.
I hasten to add that the controversy concerning Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried is a thoroughly legitimate one, since the topic is of immense importance in our culture of throwaway marriage, and there is indeed some ambiguity in Amoris that requires clarification. Nevertheless, much of the controversy could have been avoided in my view if the “doubtful” parts of the text had been read in the light of the aforementioned theological meditation on marriage and the family that constitutes the great bulk of the text and which serves as the overarching theological context for whatever pastoral “nuancing” comes later.
That brings me to the present moment and the upcoming meeting in Rome on Amoris Laetitia. The Register ran a helpful article detailing the aims of this meeting, which are specified as follows:
The gathering will be structured around five major themes related to marriage, family life, and the transmission of the faith. Reflection will begin with ‘Families Today: Reality, Beauty, and Challenges,’ dedicated to analyzing the current situation of the family, and will continue with ‘Young People and the Discovery of the Vocation to Marriage,’ ‘Married Life: The First Years of Marriage, a Decisive Time,’ and ‘In Life’s Difficulties: Accompanying and Supporting,’ which will address the accompaniment of engaged and married couples at different stages of their journey.
What is apparent in this list of themes is that there is a clear attempt here on the part of the Vatican under Pope Leo to get beyond the controversies of the past 10 years concerning Eucharistic discipline for the divorced and remarried, and to focus instead on the current situation of marriage in modern culture. In other words, Pope Leo wants to refocus the reception of Amoris on the general topic of the crisis of marriage and the family in modern culture, and to avoid focusing on the single issue of divorce and remarriage.
What Pope Leo seems to understand is that the problem of divorce and remarriage is a downstream consequence of the generalized civilizational crisis we now face with regard to the normativity and importance of lifelong monogamous marriage in the first place. He further understands that if you address that crisis first, you will go a long way toward resolving the downstream question of Eucharistic discipline.
By refocusing attention on the “fundamentals” of marriage and the challenges modern culture poses to them, and by pairing this with his other initiatives, Leo is revealing a clear pastoral and theological trajectory for this young papacy, one of patience and prudence.
By contrast, some in the Church are growing impatient with what they view as the lack of any dramatic actions by Pope Leo on any number of fronts. They want the Pope to just rip off the Band-Aid and engage in a series of immediate remedial measures to undo the moves of the Francis papacy.
But this is clearly not the style of Pope Leo, who probably learned a lot from his years of running the Augustinian order, especially about how to change an institution prudently without generating unnecessary polemics and conflict.
We have already seen Leo in his catechesis on the liturgy transcend the polemics of the so-called liturgy wars and instead re-propose the entire topic of liturgy in the light of the basic liturgical principles spelled out at the Second Vatican Council. In other words, he understands that very often controversies in the Church are the result of placing penultimate issues ahead of more foundational and ultimate theological principles. And that the only way to deal properly with the former is to make sure we are all in agreement on the latter.
And so, too, here with his approach to Amoris Laetitia. Leo is going to govern at his own pace and in his own good time. And barring illness, at age 71 he has that time.
My instincts tell me, therefore, that the upcoming meeting on Amoris will not be an exercise in pot-stirring controversy or in reheating the old stew of controversies past. It will instead, as the proposed themes suggest, focus on retrieving Amoris as a blueprint for marriage and family, fully in line with Familiaris Consortio, and not as a divisive text full of revolutionary implications.
Leo is thus emerging as a revolutionary of a different kind. He wants to refocus all “controversies” in the Church on the “fundamentals” of the faith, specifically on the Christocentrism of Vatican II and its ressourcement theology. And I suspect his approach to Amoris Laetitia will follow this same Christocentric pattern.
The Pope has focused heavily over the past year on the anthropological question. In his reflections on artificial intelligence he has repeatedly posed the question to our world: What is a human being?
Leo’s answer? It is the Christocentric answer of Gaudium et Spes 22: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”
