Two months after Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis, he appointed an old friend to a new position. The theologian Victor Manuel Fernández, an ally from Buenos Aires days, was given the honorary role of titular archbishop of Tiburnia.
Last week, Archbishop Fernández was named by the veteran Vatican-watcher Sandro Magister as the source for several passages in the Pope’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia (AL).
It is hardly news that papal documents often have multiple contributors. But the paragraphs in question were some of the most-debated: the ones dealing with how priests can make moral judgments about those who consult them.
Because the interpretation of those paragraphs is still disputed, Archbishop Fernández is suddenly the focus of attention for those still scratching their heads about the document.
The archbishop’s authorship is a matter of circumstantial evidence: there just happens to be quite a lot of it. Respectable news sources reported that Archbishop Fernández would be the main drafter of AL. Moreover, Sandro Magister found that some passages echo closely articles the archbishop published in 2005-6.
The passages in question are knotty and full of cross-references, but they revolve around the question of grave sin and mortal sin. The argument’s first step is uncontroversial. One might commit a grave sin and not be in a state of mortal sin – because one lacks (to quote the Catechism) “full knowledge” and/or “complete consent”.
Therefore – as Archbishop Fernández wrote in 2006 – “there always exists the possibility that an objective situation of sin could coexist with the life of sanctifying grace”.
That this is possible, no Catholic theologian could deny. But it is the application of the principle – which AL words in very similar terms – that “opens problematic conclusions”, says E Christian Brugger, Professor of Moral Theology at St John Vianney Seminary in Denver. AL first says we cannot judge someone guilty of grave sin; but it then says, as Prof Brugger puts it, that we can judge someone is “inculpable for the evil they will”.
Judgment, says Prof Brugger, includes “condemning but also acquitting”. The document speaks as though condemning is impossible (which makes sense), but acquitting is somehow possible. This idea is used “to acquit the consciences of divorced and civilly remarried individuals to continue in their objectively disordered life-state”.
For critics of AL, the suggestion of Archbishop Fernández’s influence may confirm their worst suspicions – particularly given the archbishop’s own story. He has downplayed the importance of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and once wrote a book called Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing. The archbishop maintained that he wrote without personal experience, but this does not wholly reassure those who see him as a dangerous wildcard.
When the parallel texts were revealed, one commentator concluded that the synod had been a “fraud”, a smokescreen for the acceptance of the archbishop’s views.
But the process of the synod, and of AL, was hardly an example of authoritarian cunning. Rather, the Pope’s approach was a mixture of intervention and laissez-faire.
In the end, the document was restrained: the Pope begins by saying it only “gathers the contributions” of the synods, rather than adding to them; it leaves Church law untouched – canon law still prohibits the divorced and remarried from receiving Communion unless, as John Paul II put it, they live “in complete continence”.
A more plausible criticism is of AL’s ambiguity. Bishop Athanasius Schneider has drawn an interesting parallel with the Arian controversies of the fourth century: in 357, amid widespread confusion, Pope Liberius signed a statement which was neither Arian nor anti-Arian. Just as the Church’s teaching had to be reiterated then, so, Bishop Schneider argues, a future document will have to clear up misinterpretations of AL.
In the meantime, the story about Archbishop Fernández’s contribution may actually help clarify matters. It reminds us that papal statements can have a messy, very personal history; partly for that reason, an isolated sentence or footnote does not always carry the full teaching authority of the Church.
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