Pope Francis There were four speakers at the presentation of the Pope’s post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation in Rome last Friday, but all eyes and ears were on Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. Before turning to his prepared text he announced: “This text is beautiful, really beautiful in my opinion.” He went on to praise the accessibility and immediacy of the language, likening it to the strikingly simple “Buona sera” with which the new Pope Francis greeted the crowd from the balcony of St Peter’s on the night of his election in 2013.
The cardinal, whose parents divorced when he was a child, spoke of the personal joy he experienced when he read Amoris Laetitia because of the way it manages to move beyond mere categories of family like ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’. “Pope Francis has succeeded in speaking about all situations without cataloguing them, without categorising, with that outlook of fundamental benevolence that is associated with the heart of God, with the eyes of Jesus that exclude no-one,” he said.
Schönborn declared that “for me, Amoris Laetitia is, first and foremost, a ‘linguistic event’”. That the cardinal chosen by the Pope to present it would describe a teaching document of nearly 300 pages in such a way surprised me. It almost suggested that the document has nothing much of consequence to say, and that it is more about the style than the substance. What’s more, he says the same thing about Francis’ earlier Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium.
The cardinal believes that this change of tone has been a key characteristic of the entire synod process, including Amoris Laetitia. He was lyrical in praise of the Pope’s “profound respect when faced with every person who is never firstly a ‘problematic case’ in a ‘category’, but rather a unique person, with his story and his journey with and towards God”.
High hopes
Those who had high hopes for major change in this document must be disappointed, and might be tempted to conclude that it is just spin and style. But one of the key things about discussion in the Church under Pope Francis is that style is important!
His deep commitment to dialogue and encounter mean that how the teaching of the Church is expressed is of huge importance for him. This frustrates the heck out of rigorists and those who are fearful of any kind of ambiguity. And it frustrates journalists in search of neat soundbites too.
For all of Cardinal Schönborn’s lyricism and his encouragement to study and digest Chapters 4 and 5 of the document, with their limpid meditations on love, passion and marriage, the reporters at Friday’s presentation all wanted to ask about the big issue – what the Pope had to say about Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried.
Surprisingly for such a topic, the Pope addresses it only obliquely – in a footnote. Speaking of the discernment process which priests should engage in with couples in ‘irregular’ situations and how that discernment might conclude that even in a subjective situation of sin, “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” (AL #305), he adds in a footnote (note #351) that “in certain cases this can include the help of the sacraments”.
Scripture
The last major papal document on love in the family, St John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio (1981) was a lot more black and white, teaching that “the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried” (FC #84). So, is this just a change of language and tone, or is it a change of doctrine?
I suggest that it is a little bit of both. The whole thrust of this section is as Cardinal Schönborn suggests –respectful, practical, pastoral and merciful. However, once again, something of major significance is contained in a footnote. One of the notes to paragraph #298 (note #329) juxtaposes lines from John Paul’s 1981 document and Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, in a way that seems to change their meaning in a more permissive direction – regarding whether divorced and remarried couples should be expected to live as ‘brother and sister’ in order to be readmitted to the sacraments.
This is deeply unfortunate. It undermines the coherence of the document and gives comfort to those who dislike and mistrust Pope Francis and his openness.
However, Cardinal Schönborn firmly holds the line that the Pope isn’t changing doctrine. He says that Amoris Laetitia is, rather, a “classic case of the development of doctrine”, along the lines described by Blessed John Henry Newman in his 1845 book An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. “There is continuity in teaching here, but there is also something really new. There’s a real development, not a rupture,” he says.
Popes don’t publish ‘second editions’ of Apostolic Exhortations. More’s the pity. However, maybe before the official Latin version of the document is published in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, footnote #329 could be removed?