I haven’t read Amoris Laetitia, so this doesn’t pretend to be an in-depth analysis. It has that in common with the BBC’s correspondent who announced at the 6pm news on Saturday that Pope Francis had now told Catholics that conscience, rather than rules, should govern their sexual morality. If this false dichotomy is not what the Holy Father intended, then her reaction would suggest he has failed. The BBC’s reading will inevitably be how he is read by many people, with a mistaken understanding of what it means to be in good conscience – which is not that my conscience is the arbiter of right and wrong, but that I have a certain limited discretion about how I apply objective moral laws in my concrete circumstances.
I don’t think the woman who came out of Mass on Sunday and told me she was canvassing opinion as to whether she needed to worry about getting an annulment now had read the Pope’s exhortation either, but she seemed confident that it was a game-changer for her. “My [new] fiancé and my family can’t wait any longer,” she told me.
I will be happy to be proved wrong, but the idea that there is something about divorce and remarriage that is best dealt with on a local, devolved basis according to conscience would seem to have been conclusively tried in English history long since, to the destruction of Catholic unity. The very idea that there might be different standards in different cultures (a way of squaring the traditionalists in Africa, apparently, where non-sacramental marriage takes all kinds of forms yet there seems a determination to retain a sense of the inviolability of a sacramental marriage) would seem to render the sacrifice of St John Fisher and St Thomas More into something rather senseless. Were they merely martyrs to inflexibility or geography?
I also think it a great shame when a papal exhortation contains polemical phrases such as “the confessional isn’t a torture chamber”. This is an Aunt Sally. It bears no relationship to any Confession I have ever had. If this is the problem, then a pastoral solution to difficulties in marriage might be to prepare priests for the Confessional better, instead of vaguely implying that somehow for years the Church’s discipline and sacraments have been inadequate to the task of guiding people towards truth. Priests have always accompanied people in this sacrament, accepting, as St Augustine put it, that God can write straight with crooked lines, even with sin.
I would genuinely like to ask the Holy Father how one accompanies someone who says that she now doesn’t need to worry about getting her first marriage annulled, because she is entitled to “some mercy”.
To where should I accompany her? As a pastor I cannot encourage her in the idea that she doesn’t need an annulment, yet she is adamant that the previous bond is no obstacle to marrying her fiancé (who also has a previous marriage) in a Catholic ceremony. Should I suggest she pray that the Lord show her that the previous marriage bond is an impediment, or should I encourage her to pray that somehow this will be set aside? If I do the latter, in what sense can I be said to be upholding the ideal of Christian marriage?
It seems to me that this path of accompaniment must, de facto, either dash itself on the rocks of the indissolubility of marriage or take on so much subjective weight of the emotional arguments for why someone should be allowed a little happiness that the notion of a bond itself will sink.
I would be delighted to be wrong, and for someone to spell out how you accompany someone in a second “marriage” who wishes that marriage to be accorded the same status as the first without denying either the validity of the first, thereby destroying Catholic teaching, or according to the choice of a second marriage some kind of freedom of maturity or choice which, with hindsight, is of a wholly different quality to the first choice and therefore raises questions as to whether it means anything at all to speak of the human ability make a covenant under grace.
I will read the document in depth, and so I speak under correction, but I am afraid that my initial feeling from the little I have seen is that the Holy Father has followed his own advice, which was to “go out and make a mess”.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.