Lost Shepherd

by Philip F. Lawler

  Yes, there were some serious differences of opinion among the bishops gathered in Rome that October. That was to be expected. Some major changes in Church teaching had been suggested; it would have been unhealthy if such proposals did not prompt vigorous debate. The purpose of the Synod was to hash out ideas. Even without the pope’s repeated encouragement, some level of disagreement among the bishops would have been inevitable. If there were no differences among them, the bishops could have stayed home.

  Naturally, prelates who had strong opinions did their best to convince others. Bishops made alliances with others who shared their views and tried to bring their undecided brethren on board. Again, there was nothing unusual about that. As Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia observed, “I have never been at a Church meeting where there aren’t groups that get together and lobby for a particular direction.”

  What was extraordinary about this Synod meeting was a two-pronged effort to curb open discussion: first by manipulating the Synod (as recounted in the previous chapter), and second by silencing those who dared to report on the manipulation.

  In its daily briefings on the Synod’s progress, the Vatican press office relied on prelates who would provide an upbeat account. Cardinal Péter Erdő, the relator general for the Synod—the official appointed by the pope to summarize the discussion—was in the best position to summarize the discussions for the press, but after delivering a strongly conservative address on the opening day, he virtually disappeared from view.

  It was not surprising that the Vatican press office wanted to ensure that the Synod’s discussions were presented to the public in a favorable light. What was remarkable was that a press office aide—Father Thomas Rosica, a Canadian who helped with English-language media—emerged as an active partisan, sending out messages from liberal prelates and commentators on his Twitter account. Still more remarkable, Rosica, who as a public-relations man should have been looking for the widest possible audience, began blocking conservatives from his Twitter feed. As the Synod debate heated up, he passed along advice on “How to handle toxic people,” demonstrating that while liberal Catholics didn’t want anyone excluded from the Church, they would gladly exclude some people from the conversation.

  Still more troubling was the polemical tone adopted by Father Antonio Spadaro, the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit journal whose articles are approved before publication by the Secretariat of State. A papal confidant and occasional ghostwriter who has been called “the pope’s mouthpiece,” he worked closely with Francis throughout the Synod process. In light of his close ties with the pontiff, one might have expected Spadaro to adopt an irenic approach to the Synod debates, but he poured out barbs on his Twitter feed with Trumpian abandon, mocking those who questioned the apparent direction of the Synod. On October 10 he tweeted, “The Church isn’t a fast train of doctrine which runs without any understanding of the landscape around it”—a statement that is at best cryptic and at worst incoherent. Later in the day he took a more explicitly adversarial stand: “Those who want a rigid & mummified #Synod15 are attacking its method & communication.”

  Father James Martin, a high-profile American Jesuit, joined the campaign with a series of tweets praising liberal prelates and criticizing conservatives. He reached his own peak of partisanship with the assertion that Cardinal Robert Sarah had compared homosexuals to Nazis, a grossly unfair characterization of the cardinal’s remarks about the dangers of gender ideology.

  Yet another Jesuit, the journalist Thomas Reese, was equally unsubtle in his summary of the Synod debate: “One side sees only the law—the marriage contract is permanent and can be terminated only by death. The other side sees millions of people suffering from broken marriages that cannot be put back together.” And responding to complaints that the Synod was being railroaded, he spun his own conspiracy theory: “They’re saying that it’s being manipulated and preprogrammed when, in point of fact, all of the synods since the Second Vatican Council were manipulated and programmed but by the conservatives.”

  This partisan tone eventually affected the Synod participants themselves. Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., in an interview with the Jesuit magazine America, spoke disparagingly about “some bishops whose position is that we shouldn’t be discussing any of this anyway” and who “paint something in false tones.” He wondered “if it is really that they find they just don’t like the Pope.”

  Such was the atmosphere in which the pope himself, on October 7, delivered an unscheduled address to the Synod in which, according to multiple reports, he admonished the prelates against indulging in conspiracy theories.

  Cardinals Plead for Open Debate

  Shortly after that papal intervention, Sandro Magister, the veteran Vatican-watcher for L’Espresso, published a letter to Francis, dated October 5 and signed by thirteen cardinals, expressing serious concerns about the conduct of the Synod. The letter’s existence, its contents, and the names of its signers quickly became the dominant topic of discussion at the Vatican.

  After expressing misgivings about the Synod’s working document, as well as the procedures and the composition of the committee that would draft the final document, the signatories wrote:

  In turn, these things have created a concern that the new procedures are not true to the traditional spirit and purpose of a synod. It is unclear why these procedural changes are necessary. A number of fathers feel the new process seems designed to facilitate predetermined results on important disputed questions.

  Finally and perhaps most urgently, various fathers have expressed concern that a synod designed to address a vital pastoral matter—reinforcing the dignity of marriage and family—may become dominated by the theological/doctrinal issue of Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. If so, this will inevitably raise even more fundamental issues about how the Church, going forward, should interpret and apply the Word of God, her doctrines and her disciplines to changes in culture. The collapse of liberal Protestant churches in the modern era, accelerated by their abandonment of key elements of Christian belief and practice in the name of pastoral adaptation, warrants great caution in our own synodal discussions.

  The signers, according to Magister, were Cardinals Carlo Caffarra, Thomas Collins, Timothy Dolan, Willem Eijk, Péter Erdő, Gerhard Müller, Wilfrid Napier, George Pell, Mauro Piacenza, Robert Sarah, Angelo Scola, Jorge Urosa Savino, and André Vingt-Trois. That list of signatories was impressive. Cardinal Erdő was the synod’s relator general, while Napier and Vingt-Trois were among the synod’s four presidents-delegate. Müller, Pell, and Piacenza headed offices of the Roman Curia.

  Some of the cardinals on that list, however, denied having signed the letter. It was not clear how Magister obtained the letter or why he listed the names of cardinals who now said they had not signed it. Informed Vatican sources indicated that a letter had indeed been written, but Magister’s information regarding the letter and its signatories was imprecise. Many Vatican-watchers speculated that Francis was responding to this letter when, in his October 7 address to the Synod, he reportedly cautioned against applying a “hermeneutic of conspiracy” to the procedures for the meeting.

  And who had leaked the cardinals’ letter? Ordinarily, in searching for the source of a leaked document, the first order of business is to consider whose interests would be served by the publicity. In this case, however, it was not at all clear who would benefit from the publication of a confidential letter to the pope.

  At first glance it might seem that the authors of the letter had the most to gain. If they were not satisfied with the response they received from the Holy Father, they might want to add some public pressure for their cause. Two considerations support that hypothesis. First, the leak came through Magister, who had frequently been critical of Francis and had raised questions in his own columns similar to those raised by the cardinals’ letter. Second, the letter became public only after Francis responded to the cardinals’ concerns—a week or more after it
had been written.

  Nevertheless, the publication of a confidential letter may have damaged the cause of the cardinals who wrote it. The leak was perceived as an underhanded attempt to manipulate public opinion—in short, an act of disloyalty. Cardinal Müller, who refused to confirm or deny that he had signed the letter, was steaming over the leak, saying that it created the appearance that Francis was surrounded by “wolves” who sought to undermine his authority. So perhaps the leak was intended to make trouble for the cardinals who signed the letter.

  Speculation aside, the public release of the letter did seem to serve the interests of the journalist Sandro Magister. This was not his first important leak. The previous June, the Vatican press office had suspended his press privileges after he published an early draft of the papal encyclical Laudato Si’. The Vatican had stressed that the draft published by Magister was not the final text, but there were no significant differences between the two. He did not have the final document, but he had something very close.

  Likewise, Magister had not gotten his hands on the final text of the cardinals’ letter to Francis. Cardinal Pell—who acknowledged that he had signed the letter—reported that Magister’s version contained “errors in both the content and the list of signatories.” But as Magister would later point out, Pell did not deny that the concerns expressed in the final draft were essentially the same as those in Magister’s version. It seems likely, then, that after Magister obtained a draft that was circulating among a number of cardinals, the letter was eventually revised and signed by a somewhat different group.

  Cardinal Urosa, who acknowledged signing the letter, said that “many cardinals” had seen it, either in draft or final form. If multiple copies were circulating, then it is not surprising that one found its way into the hands of a journalist. What is noteworthy, actually, is Magister’s failure to obtain the final version. It suggests that the cardinals who signed the letter were not eager to publicize it and, more important, that they did not leak it after it was delivered to the pope and he had responded to them.

  The available evidence, in short, does not allow us to identify the leaker, let alone his motivation. But this much we do know: once again, on the basis of a leaked document, the Vatican was caught up in an unhealthy welter of accusations and denials. Once again, someone at the Vatican was determined to undermine someone else. Once again, the dignity of the Holy See was battered by stories of palace intrigues.

  A Final Statement—without a Conclusion

  As October drew toward a close, the debates and maneuvers and leaks and complaints came to an end, and the Synod fathers approved their final set of propositions. In separate interviews following the conclusion of the meeting, Archbishop Forte and Cardinal Pell offered contradictory interpretations of the Synod’s final judgment about the Kasper proposal.

  Pell told the National Catholic Register that “there is no mention anywhere of Communion for the divorced and remarried. It’s not one of the possibilities that was floated.” Yet Forte, the synod’s special secretary, told a radio audience that the final report permits the reception of Holy Communion by “some” persons who have remarried outside the Church, following an examination of conscience and a discernment process with their pastors.

  Was the report really that ambiguous? With his usual candor, Pell said that it was not so much ambiguous as “insufficient”—and deliberately so. He told the Register: “The document is cleverly written to get consensus.”

  Thanks to some careful phrasing, the Synod had achieved consensus—barely. Paragraph 86, which encourages divorced and remarried Catholics to resort to the “internal forum” (conversation with a priest) to discern the obstacles to their “fuller participation in the life of the Church,” received just one vote more than the required two-thirds majority. But the Synod did not achieve clarity. The Catholic Church either does or does not hold that couples in a second conjugal relationship whose previous spouses are living should not receive Communion. Which is it? Different prelates gave different answers.

  When the Synod of Bishops gathers, the faithful expect to deepen their understanding of what the Church teaches. Admittedly, the Synod does not teach with authority. Only the pope, in his own post-synodal statement, does that. But bishops are teachers, and we have a right to expect instruction rather than confusion or, worse, obfuscation.

  During the Synod discussions, there were frequent suggestions that the Church should use more welcoming language, adopt a more compassionate attitude, offer more winsome arguments. Yes, we all want welcoming pastors, compassionate confessors, and winsome evangelists. But from our teachers we want clarity. At this assembly of the Synod, we were told, the bishops were concerned with pastoral matters, not doctrinal issues. Yet the Kasper proposal raised a major doctrinal question, and rather than addressing that question directly, the Synod tried to finesse it.

  On questions of doctrine, as on questions of law, precise language is crucial. A lawyer who drafts a contract with deliberately ambiguous language to cover up a lack of agreement between the parties is inviting disaster. Since the Synod’s statement was not binding, however, the danger to the Faith could be averted if the pope, fulfilling his God-given duty as the Church’s supreme teacher, addressed the question that the Synod fathers avoided.

  Catholics who had followed the Synod debate now anxiously awaited Francis’s apostolic exhortation. And it was a relatively short wait. John Paul II and Benedict XVI had routinely taken two years to complete their apostolic exhortations after previous assemblies of the Synod. But never before had the Synod left such a crucial question unresolved.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Document and the Dubia

  In April 2016, Pope Francis issued his apostolic exhortation summarizing the Synod’s message. Comprising 325 numbered paragraphs and filling more than 250 pages, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”) is the lengthiest papal document on record. Attributing this length to the “rich fruits of the two-year Synod process” and the “wide variety of questions” raised, the pope advises against “a rushed reading of the text” (7)1—advice that the media necessarily ignored in their hurry to announce the papal verdict on the matters that had conspicuously vexed the world’s bishops.

  Despite its prolixity, Amoris Laetitia provides no clear answer to the question that everyone was asking: whether the pope would open the door for divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Communion. Some commentators announced that the pope had upheld traditional Church teaching; others declared that he had made a dramatic innovation. Neither interpretation of this puzzling document is demonstrably wrong.

  In fact, Francis deliberately avoids a categorical answer to the question, insisting that “not all discussions of doctrinal, moral, or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium” (3). He argues that “what is part of a practical discernment in particular circumstances cannot be elevated to the level of a rule” (304), urging pastors to guide couples through a discernment of their situation, helping them to “grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end” (305).

  In the passage that comes closest to an endorsement of the Kasper proposal, paragraph 305, Francis teaches that “a pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives.” Pressing further, he writes that “it is possible that in an objective situation of sin—which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such—a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.” In the accompanying footnote, number 351, he adds, “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments.”

  That passage—and especially that footnote—could be read, and indeed was read by many interpreters, as adopting the Kasper proposal. Is the pope saying that some Catholics who are living in irregular marital unions may receive the sacraments? Is h
e suggesting that a second marital union, which the Church has always regarded as adulterous, might be justifiable under special circumstances? If so, he is making a radical change in the teachings of the Church. Yet his actual language leaves these crucial questions unanswered. Apparently that was his intent.

  “By thinking that everything is black and white,” paragraph 305 continues, “we sometimes close off the way of grace and of growth, and discourage paths of sanctification which give glory to God.” Later Francis adds, “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 …” (308). Amoris Laetitia offers little guidance to the pastors who must provide “the Church’s help” to persons in irregular marriages. Emphasizing flexibility, the pope leaves the details to others: “Different communities will have to devise more practical and effective initiatives that respect both the Church’s teaching and local problems and needs” (199).

  Francis devotes only a small portion of his apostolic exhortation to the question of Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics, which he does not take up until paragraph 291. The most important theme of the document, he has declared, is the beauty of marital love, the subject of its “central chapters” (four and five of nine). In a long and deep meditation on St. Paul’s ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13 (“Love is patient and kind …”), the pope offers the sort of spiritual wisdom and practical advice that he encourages priests to provide for their people, followed by an explanation of how the family, based on marriage and nourished by the Sacraments, should provide material and moral support not only for its own members, but for its neighbors and society at large.

  A proper understanding of marriage and human sexuality, writes Francis, is crucial to restoring health to our troubled society. In the Western world especially, where secular society is often hostile to the Christian ideal of marriage, the Church must uphold that ideal even against public pressure.