He was asked whether there were any real new possibilities for access to the sacraments that did not exist prior to the publication of the “Amoris Laetitia” encyclical [sic]. “I could say ‘yes’ and leave it at that,” Francis had replied. “But that would be too brief a response. I recommend that all of you read the presentation made by Cardinal Schönborn, a great theologian.”
If Francis were to declare clearly and formally that divorced and remarried Catholics might receive Communion, he would have to ignore the strong resistance that he encountered in the Synod, undermining his claim to be speaking on behalf of the world’s bishops. He would also have to contradict the teaching of John Paul II, who stated in Familiaris Consortio that divorced-and-remarried Catholics must live as brothers and sisters if they wish to approach the Eucharist. If they were otherwise admitted to Communion, John Paul wrote, “the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church’s teaching about the indissolubility of marriage” (84). The logic of that magisterial statement is compelling. And if Francis reversed the policy set by John Paul II, it would seem clear that a future pontiff could reverse the policy set by Francis, and no papal statement on this question could be regarded as conclusive.
Despite his studied ambiguity, Francis has unquestionably opened a door for the divorced and remarried to receive Communion. As a practical matter, virtually every divorced and remarried Catholic can argue that his case falls into that special category—whatever it is—of those allowed to receive the Eucharist. If his pastor disagrees, he will probably move on to another parish, until he finds a pastor who accepts his argument.
Was that the pope’s intent: to leave every parish priest free to make his own interpretations of Church teaching? Having spoken frequently about decentralization of Church authority, did the pope really mean to go that far? He has playfully encouraged young Catholics to “make a mess”; was he trying to set an example by deconstructing the teaching office?
The Code of Canon Law puts priests under a solemn obligation to avoid scandal by withholding the Eucharist from those who persist in manifest grave sin (canon 915). An adulterous relationship is a manifest grave sin. The Argentine bishops appear to say—with papal approval—that in some circumstances priests should administer Communion to people who are living in objectively adulterous relationships. Has canon 915 been amended or abrogated, then? The pope is the supreme legislator of the Church, with the unquestioned power to modify canon law. But he has not done so. In fact, he has deliberately avoided the exercise of his authority, giving the impression that formal Church teachings and laws do not really matter and can safely be ignored.
The Four Cardinals and the Dubia
The confusion generated by Amoris Laetitia and the resulting threat to Catholic unity prompted four cardinals—Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, and Joachim Meisner2—to write to the pontiff in September 2016 pleading for clarification, observing that “divergent” and even “conflicting” interpretations of Chapter 8 of the exhortation had provoked “uncertainty, confusion and disorientation among many of the faithful” regarding the Church’s teaching on marriage. “[C]ompelled in conscience by [their] pastoral responsibility,” the cardinals submitted to the pope “as supreme teacher of the faith” the following five questions—dubia—about the exhortation, asking him “to resolve the uncertainties and bring clarity”:
1.Is it now “possible to grant absolution in the sacrament of penance and thus to admit to holy Communion a person who, while bound by a valid marital bond, lives together with a different person more uxorio [as man and wife]”? And “[c]an the expression ‘in certain cases’ found in Note 351 … be applied to divorced persons who are in a new union and who continue to live more uxorio?”
2.“[D]oes one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis splendor, 79, based on sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, on the existence of absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions?”
3.“[I]s it still possible to affirm that a person who habitually lives in contradiction to a commandment of God’s law, as for instance the one that prohibits adultery (Matthew 19:3–9), finds him or herself in an objective situation of grave habitual sin … ?”
4.“[D]oes one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis splendor, 81, … according to which ‘circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act “subjectively” good or defensible as a choice’”?
5.“[D]oes one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, 56, … that conscience can never be authorized to legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts by virtue of their object?”
After waiting patiently for several weeks without a reply, the four cardinals presented their questions—each of which can be answered simply “yes” or “no”—to the universal Church for discussion, explaining that they interpreted the pontiff’s silence as “an invitation to continue the reflection, and the discussion, calmly and with respect.”
The staunchest defenders of Francis professed shock at the public appeal, calling it an act of disrespect for the supreme pontiff, but Cardinal George Pell rejected that criticism. The four cardinals, he observed, were merely raising questions, and significant questions at that, not fomenting dissent: “How can you disagree with a question?”
Msgr. Pio Vito Pinto, the dean of the Roman Rota, took a very different line. Outraged by the cardinals’ letter, he said that the pope could remove the four prelates from the College of Cardinals as punishment for their effrontery. Cardinals Burke, Brandmüller, Caffarra, and Meisner could be charged with causing “grave scandal,” Pinto declared, for their questions about the interpretation of an apostolic exhortation that reflects the work of the Synod of Bishops—begging the question whether the apostolic exhortation does reflect the work of the Synod of Bishops. “The action of the Holy Spirit cannot be doubted,” Pinto insisted.
Still the pope was silent, offering no public response to the dubia. In November 2016 he convened a consistory to confer red hats on seventeen new cardinals. Before his previous two consistories, Francis had held days of discussion with the members of the College. This time, however, he did not bring the cardinals together apart from the formal ceremony, prompting the Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti to speculate that he feared some “cardinals, eager for a decisive word from the Pope,” might seize the occasion to re-submit the dubia.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that his office could respond to the dubia if the pope authorized him to do so. Since his congregation issues judgments “with the authority of the Pope,” he noted, it would be inappropriate to intervene without the pope’s approval.
Reports of a battle inside the Vatican over the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia were overblown, said Cardinal Müller, and reflected the tendency of reporters to interpret Church affairs in terms of power politics. At the same time, he said, it is important for the faithful to “remain objective and not be drawn into polarization.” To the most controversial question about Amoris Laetitia—whether divorced and remarried Catholics can be admitted to Communion—Müller declined to give a direct answer.
While Müller expressed confidence that Amoris Laetitia is fully compatible with previous Church teachings, the Italian cardinal who had signed the dubia disagreed. Carlo Caffarra remarked that “only a blind man could deny that there’s great confusion, uncertainty, and insecurity in the Church.” In an interview with the Italian daily Il Foglio, Caffarra said that the confusion involves “extremely serious questions for the life of the Church and the eternal salvation of the faithful.”
“In recent months,” Caffarra said, “on some very fundamental questions regarding the sacraments, such as marriage, confession
and the Eucharist, and the Christian life in general,” diocesan bishops have issued contradictory interpretations of the pope’s words and announced radically different policies. “There is only one way to get to the bottom” of the confusion, he reasoned: “to ask the author of the text.” He decried as “false and calumnious” the charge that the dubia have caused divisions within the Church. “The division that already exists in the Church is the cause, not the effect,” of the plea for papal clarification, he said.
But the desire for clarity is itself the problem, suggested Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Australia. In an interview published in America, he warned that the prelates seeking clarification were pursuing a “false clarity that comes because you don’t address reality.” In the Synod sessions, Coleridge “heard voices that sounded very clear and certain but only because they never grappled with the real question or never dealt with the real facts.” While some people prefer to see things in black and white, he said, pastors are “very often dealing in a world of grays and you have to accompany people, listen to them before you speak to them, give them time and give them space, and then speak your word perhaps.” The archbishop did not explain how moral clarity might be incompatible with “real facts,” but it is often incompatible with what we desire.
Coleridge conceded that many Catholics have been “unnerved” by the papal document, as his countryman Cardinal Pell had suggested. “Some people expect from the Pope clarity and certainty on every question and every issue,” said Coleridge, “but a pastor can’t provide that necessarily.”
The Ambiguity Is Intentional
As weeks turned into months and the dubia remained unanswered, it became increasingly clear that the pope’s silence was strategic. The confusion in Amoris Laetitia is not a bug; it is a feature.
The defenders of the apostolic exhortation insisted that its notorious eighth chapter was clear enough and that the four cardinals who raised questions about its meaning were merely being argumentative. But if that were the case, the pontiff could have avoided this public embarrassment by answering the cardinals’ questions. He has chosen not to do so.
There are only three possible ways to interpret the pope’s silence. Either he was being remarkably rude to his closest counselors, flatly refusing to answer their honest questions, or he did not want to give a straight answer. Or both.
The one possibility that can be quickly excluded from discussion is that the pope believed the meaning of Amoris Laetitia was already clear to the faithful. It was not. After two years of intense debate on the most controversial question involved, intelligent and informed Catholics were still unsure as to what exactly Francis had taught.
If the papal teaching were clear, how could it mean one thing in Poland and another in Germany, one thing in Philadelphia and Portland and another in Chicago and San Diego? If some bishops were interpreting the papal document incorrectly, why had they not been corrected?
As the four conscientious cardinals continued to press the pope for clarification, some Catholic reporters tried to determine how long it ordinarily takes for a pope to respond to dubia of this sort. There is no good answer to that question, because there is no precedent for this query. Ordinarily, papal documents are clear. If any confusion arises from papal statements, a clarification usually follows quickly—long before any formal dubium can be raised—because the very point of papal teaching is to provide clarity. Usually. But this was a different case.
John Allen, writing at Crux, offered a plausible reading of the pope’s intentions: “Maybe this is his version of Catholic R&D, letting things play out for a while on the ground before he says anything irreversible.” In other words, maybe the pope is deliberately making room for pastoral experimentation, to see what works. Archbishop Coleridge seemed comfortable with that approach. “Pastoral care moves within ambiguity,” he wrote on his Twitter account, adding a dig at the four cardinals: “We now need a pastoral patience not the quick-fix anxiety voiced here.”
If Allen and Coleridge believed that the pope was encouraging experimentation by leaving matters unsettled, another observer—one much closer to the pope—insisted that the meaning of Amoris Laetitia had been settled. Father Antonio Spadaro reacted to the four cardinals’ public letter with a furious tweet-storm. “The Pope has ‘clarified,’” the Jesuit began. “Those who don’t like what they hear pretend not to hear it!” He included a link to the pope’s letter to the Argentine bishops, as if a leaked private letter bore any authority. And, of course, the Argentine bishops’ policy did not address the dubia. Taunting the four cardinals, Spadaro later tweeted, “Amoris Laetitia is an act of the Magisterium (card. Schönborn) so don’t keep asking the same question until you get the answer you want … .”
Credited with a major role in drafting Amoris Laetitia, Spadaro may have revealed more on Twitter than just a splenetic temper. If he wanted the cardinals to stop asking difficult questions, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the pope himself wants to bury those questions. And the pope’s continued silence reinforces that suspicion.
Defending the Pope, Avoiding the Issue
“All I know is that the doubts that are there, that are expressed, aren’t my doubts, and I think they’re not the doubts of the universal Church,” Cardinal Blase Cupich reassured Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register in answer to a question about the dubia. Unperturbed by any ambiguities, the archbishop of Chicago continued:
The document that they’re having doubts about is the fruit of two synods, and the fruit of propositions that were voted on by two-thirds of the bishops who were there. It is a post-synodal apostolic exhortation and so it stands on the same level as all the other post-synodal apostolic exhortations as a magisterial document. I think that if you begin to question the legitimacy of what is being said in such a document, do you then throw into question then [sic] all of the other documents that have been issued before by the other popes?
Actually, as Pentin observed, the propositions in question were not approved by the Synod of Bishops. But that was almost beside the point, because the four cardinals were not expressing doubts about what the Synod said. They were not even directly questioning the pope’s summary of the Synod’s deliberations. They were questioning some persons’ interpretation of the pope’s document summarizing the Synod.
To raise questions about Amoris Laetitia, Cupich suggests, even questions about how it should be understood, is to call into question all previous papal statements. A more nuanced approach to the Magisterium, however, may be necessary. In raising their dubia, the four cardinals observed that some interpretations of Amoris Laetitia appear to conflict directly with Veritatis Splendor, the magisterial work of St. John Paul II. If one papal pronouncement appears to contradict another, the conflict cannot be resolved by saying that all good Catholics should accept the authority of papal documents.
Another of Francis’s new American cardinals, Joseph Tobin of Newark, also tried to sidestep the issues raised in the dubia. “[W]hat would really be helpful is that rather than each individual bishop or cardinal demanding that the pope pronounce on every concrete application of the magisterium, that we as bishops suck it up and do what we’re supposed to do.” That might make sense if the bishops knew what they were supposed to do. But the dubia address the point that many bishops do not know what they are supposed to do. For that matter, some bishops who are quite confident that they know what to do are at odds with others equally confident that they know what to do.
The confusion surrounding the papal document is evident. There are two ways to address it. One is by answering the cardinals’ questions. The other is by imitating Rex Mottram, a comical dunce in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The Jesuit priest who has undertaken the task of instructing the insincere Mottram in the Catholic Faith reports with exasperation,
Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: “Just as many as you say, Father.” Then again I asked him: “Supposing the Pope l
ooked up and saw a cloud and said “It’s going to rain,” would that be bound to happen?” “Oh, yes, Father.” “But supposing it didn’t?” He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.”
Cardinal Marx of Munich opted for the Mottram approach, telling the National Catholic Register that the German bishops’ conference had no difficulty in reaching agreement on the proper interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. They issued guidelines, reflecting “a clear position,” for the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to Communion in some cases.
Father Spadaro of La Civiltà Cattolica took the same line, insisting that the four cardinals’ questions had already been answered. Conceding that the dubia involved “interesting” questions, he said that they “were already raised during the Synod,” where “all of the necessary responses were given, and more than once.” In another obvious slap at the cardinals who had raised the dubia, the combative Spadaro said that “a doubtful conscience can easily find all of the answers it seeks, if it seeks them with sincerity.” Lest anyone miss his point, he went on to say that the discussion of Amoris Laetitia should exclude “those who use criticism for other purposes or ask questions in order to create difficulty or division.”
Spadaro outdid himself in January 2017 when he posted a cryptic comment on his Twitter account ridiculing those who sought certainty about the papal teaching:
Theology is no #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people …
Was Spadaro suggesting that when we speak about “real life,” the rules of logic don’t apply? If someone tells you, “You can talk all you want about the law of gravity, but in real life … ,” you won’t know what is coming next, but you know it will be nonsense. The law of gravity is a law of real life, which applies to real people.
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