Father Martin, Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia--Takeaway II

Well to stir up the hornet’s nest, let’s return to Father Martin and his “ten takeaways” from Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia.  The issue today is the sovereignty of conscience.  In forming our conscience we must pay serious attention to the teaching of the Church—but the teaching of the Church cannot take the place of conscience nor can we be expected to give blind obedience to the teaching of the Church as that would be equivalent to resigning our personal responsibility for making moral decisions.  We need personally and seriously to consider the choices that face us in life.  The Church provides guidance, but it must be our interior adherence to the Holy Spirit that sets our course.   

2. The role of conscience is paramount in moral decision making. “Individual conscience needs to be better incorporated into the church’s practice in certain situations which do not objectively embody our understanding of marriage” (303). That is, the traditional belief that individual conscience is the final arbiter of the moral life has been forgotten here. The church has been “called to form consciences, not to replace them” (37). Yes, it is true, the Pope says, that a conscience needs to be formed by church teaching. But conscience does more than to judge what does or does not agree with church teaching. Conscience can also recognize with “a certain moral security” what God is asking (303). Pastors, therefore, need to help people not simply follow rules, but to practice “discernment,” a word that implies prayerful decision making (304).

Where I think a lot of people go wrong in the process is that they take the teaching of the Church as one opinion among many and do not honestly wrestle with its authoritative angel.  But it is important to acknowledge that at the end of the dark night of struggle, God does ot always grant the victory to the magisterial angel.  

Franz Jäggerstätter was a farmer from Sankt Radegund in Austria.  He was born illegitimate though he was adopted by his mother’s husband after her marriage in 1917 and took his family name.  Jäggerstätter was not a religious, much less devout, youth and in addition to a life of general rowdiness, he himself fathered a daughter out of wedlock.  However in 1936 he married Franziska Schwaninger, a very devout Catholic and himself underwent a personal conversion.  He joined the Third Order of Saint Francis and undertook the duties as Sacristan in his local parish.  He was the only citizen of Sankt Radegund to vote against the Anschluss (the union of Austria to the Third Reich) in 1938 and although he was conscripted into the Army in 1940, his work as a farmer gave him a deferment from service.

As the war progressed Jäggerstätter began to question its morality.  He even had several interviews with his bishop whom he, Jäggerstätter, felt was avoiding the moral issues surrounding the War.  When called up for active service he felt that he could not in conscious serve despite the assurances of both his bishop and parish priest that it was his responsibility to his family and his duty as a citizen.  He was arrested and imprisoned and tried in a military court for the “undermining military morale” by his objections to the legitimacy of the War.   He was executed by guillotine on August 9, 1943.

Even in death he was excoriated by the Church for his conscientious objection.  Remember that in Jäggerstätter’s time the Catholic Church had established no criterion to justify conscientious objection.  His parish priest told him that by putting himself in the position where he would be executed he would be neglecting his duty towards his wife and children.  He died in disgrace and without the support of the Church.  It was only in the 1960’s through the efforts of Gordon Zahn and Thomas Merton that his story became known and he was perceived as a hero of conscience.  He was beatified in 2007 and his feast day is May 21. 

I think today there is no Christian who would disagree with Jäggerstätter that the Nazi cause was sinful and unjust but that is not how it was seen at the time.  To the contrary—the German and Austrian bishops and clergy supported the War and even the Pope was deliberately (and scandalously) vague, if not silent, about the atrocities of the Third Reich.  Jäggerstätter determined his conscience contrary to what he was being told were Catholic principles. 

A simpler example, though far less dramatic, is the one found in the Gospel of Luke (also found in Matthew and Mark) where the Disciples pick grain on the Sabbath to satisfy their hunger.  They were in violation of the Law.  Jesus could see, however, how the Law did not apply in their instance and reprimanded the Pharisees and scribes who criticize them.  This is only one of many examples in the Gospels where Jesus himself sanctions—and even practices—a violation of the Law of Moses because the particular situation is complicated by extraneous factors that require a moral response distinct from strict literal obedience to the Law of God.    

Father James Martin and Thoughts on Amoris Laetitia

Father James Martin, SJ

Father James Martin recently published in America magazine the top ten “takeaways” from Amoris Laetitia.  I think they are worth considering and I want to make some comments on them here as Father Martin gives us some great insights into what really is a historic shift in the way we perceive the moral issues affecting contemporary family life.  Here is number one. 

1. The church needs to understand families and individuals in all their complexity. The church needs to meet people where they are. So pastors are to “avoid judgments which do not take into account the complexity of various situations” (296). People should not be “pigeonholed or fit into overly rigid classifications leaving no room for personal and pastoral discernment” (298). In other words, one size does not fit all. People are encouraged to live by the Gospel, but should also be welcomed into a church that appreciates their particular struggles and treats them with mercy. “Thinking that everything is black and white” is to be avoided (305). And the church cannot apply moral laws as if they were “stones to throw at people’s lives” (305). Overall, he calls for an approach of understanding, compassion and accompaniment.

There has been in the past, at least in American Catholic culture, too great an emphasis on the objective moral values without placing them in the context of the every-day-life situations in which real people find themselves.  Despite the admonitions of Saint Paul both in Romans and in Galatians, we seem determined to live under the law—or at least make our neighbor live under the law—rather than under grace.  The old catechism, for all its flaws, reminded us that circumstances qualified the sinfulness of our wrongdoings.  In addition to the act having to be gravely wrong to be a “mortal sin,” we had to know that it was wrong and we had to give full consent of the will to it.   We were conditioned to interpret “know it is wrong” and “full consent of the will” in the most narrow of senses.  In fact it is not enough for a priest or a parent or a nosy neighbor to tell us something is wrong for us to know it is wrong.  To know that it is wrong we must have, if not a full understanding that it is wrong at least that interior conviction of its wrongness.  And full consent of the will is even more complex as a variety of exterior circumstances can seriously affect our freedom to make the best possible choice.  Moral decisions are often not easy and they are even less often “black and white.”  This is not to condone “situation ethics.”  Wrong remains wrong; right remains right but the degree of moral culpability is not a steady quotient.  Even more to the point, however, is that it is not left to us to evaluate the state of another person’s soul and to throw the stones of judgment at those with whose moral decisions we disagree. 

In the first session of the Second Vatican Council Bishop Emil de Smedt of Brugge (Belgium) declared that the Church had to move away from “clericalism, legalism, and triumphalism.”  Some progress on this migration had been made before the long winter’s night of John Paul II and Benedict XVI set in and now Francis seems to be returning to the previous course.  I think it no coincidence that those most upset by the distinctly unjuridical tone of Amoris Laetitia are the same voices that decry the fully conscious and active  participation in the Liturgy and who just get goose-bumps at the thought of a Pontifical High Mass at the Throne in the Extraordinary Form.  In other words, it is all of a package.  Of course this can be interpreted a number of ways.  The contemporary liturgy might be watering down our moral sensibility and diminishing our sense of right and wrong whereas the rubrical rigor of the old Mass kept us all corralled into sinless lives. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the contemporary Liturgy is allowing us to perceive the Gospel in a new light:  one that shows us through the Good Samaritan, through the good thief, through the Pharisee and the Publican, through Jesus having table fellowship with sinners, through the woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee, and even through those gentile magi, that in God’s sight life is not lived in the black and white.  To whichever interpretation one is inclined, it is another clear indication that we have two Churches that are drifting further and further apart. 

Amoris Laetita: Opening An Even Bigger Door?

Well, Amoris Laetitia is out and krazies are spattered with the fecal matter they have thrown into the fan.   Everyone is reacting to it—progressives and conservatives.  After Mass yesterday it was the only subject of conversation during the coffee hour.  The pastor and the parochial vicar have some very different thoughts on it, though I would label neither of them “conservative.” One little old lady couldn’t stop crying as she told us how she had gone forty years without Holy Communion—“every Sunday having my heart pulled out of my chest and crushed,” because she had left an abusive husband and civilly married a man—who could provide for her five girls.  She loved her second husband and she found graces every day in their relationship; she had grown deep in prayer and grace throughout the years, but her hunger for the Eucharist had to go unsatisfied.  Finally able to have her marriage in the Church blessed (the abusive husband has died), she is at Mass every morning and says she never takes the sacraments for granted.   Another woman told us “I am in an invalid marriage and I can go to Holy Communion every day.  O, we were married by a priest—at Mass even—but we have always planned, because of a gene that runs in my family for dwarfism—not to have children.  That renders my marriage invalid.  But I know that before God Bob and I stand in his grace.  And nothing keeps me away from the Christ in the Eucharist.”

I want to look at Amoris Laetitia not as a pastoral document about the remarried but from a different perspective, a sign of greater things to come in the Church.  For almost five centuries Catholic theology, like its Liturgy, had been frozen and not allowed to develop.  This was due primarily as a reaction to the Protestant Reformations and the challenges to our traditional faith.  Through those Middle Ages where the Church was so strong, the universities were the center of theological debate.  A particular subject of debate was whether the Blessed Virgin had been conceived with or without Original Sin.  The Dominicans, ironically, opposed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Franciscans and Carmelites supported it.  But all matter of theological topics were up for argument and it was from the give-and-take, in the arguments pro and con, that the magisterium was able to formulate doctrines.  The Reformation put an end to all that.  Martin Luther posted his list of 95 theses he wanted to debate at the University Church of Wittenberg and suddenly the Church said: no more debate.  We will define our doctrines sitting here in our Roman ivory towers.  Students for priesthood were pulled from the universities and locked into closed seminaries where ideas could be controlled.  Catechisms for the laity and manuals for the seminarians appeared: here are the questions: here are the answers.  Memorize the answers.  It was a time of doctrinal retrenchment.  And it only got worse.  In the nineteenth century as Protestant scholars begin looking at the scriptures from historical, linguistic, and structural perspectives and new insights began to emerge: there are four sources for the Book of Genesis not a single author; Paul did not write Hebrews (among other books attributed to him); there are inconsistencies in the Resurrection narrative, etc.   And then scholars—both Catholic and Protestant—got into the Church Fathers and found some wide discrepancies both among the Fathers and between the Fathers and contemporary Catholicism.  Rome totally freaked and the papacies of Leo XIII and Pius X built a strong firewall against “modernism.”  The walls did not last.  In the years after WWI, Catholic scholars surreptitiously began working again in the forbidden fields.  Some were caught and silenced—Congar, Chenu, deLubac—but the tide was overwhelming.  In 1943 Pius XII sanctioned biblical studies with the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. The work of the historians and patristic scholars came out into the light again as well.   Little by little the Catholic intellectual world began to open up again.

The one area that has remained shut—indeed padlocked—is the sexual moral theology.  When it comes to morality of economics, politics, immigration, human rights—no problem.  The Church has made huge strides.   But don’t dare say a word about human sexuality.  Any number have tried—including Charles Curran—and the axe always falls.  Hopefully Amoris Laetitia is the unchaining of a much-needed theological investigation into contemporary issues for which the old sixteenth-century answers no longer seem to work.

No intellectual discipline stands in a vacuum and especially today there is an appreciation for the interdisciplinary nature of sound scholarship.  Theology always stood on the shoulders of Philosophy.  Today—if it is to have credibility—the Church also needs both to dialogue with and to draw on the sciences: the behavioral sciences, the social sciences, and the physical sciences.  This does not mean “surrendering” to the surrounding culture—far from it.  In the spinning whirl of contemporary culture the Church needs to keep its compass pointed to the Truth but it does not do this by burying its head in the sands of the answers of simpler days.    Today we face not only divorce and remarriage, but same-sex attraction, gender identity, artificial conception, genetic engineering, stem-cell research, embryology, various forms of contraception, abortion, surrogacy, and even potential cloning of human persons.  We have a lot of work to do to catch up on our scientific knowledge and bring it into dialogue with our theology if we are to have anything credible to say—or be listened to—in the world in which we live.  To quote a famous moral theologian: If the Church does not listen to the world, then the world will never listen to the Church.   

Finally, one more note about Amoris Laetitia.  In the years before, during, and for sometime after Vatican II there was an outstanding moral theologian teaching in Rome: Father Bernard Häring, CSsR.  Häring taught moral theology in Rome from 1949 until 1987.  He had a very different approach than other theologians, declaring that moral action was not about following a set of external rules, but fundamentally a dialogue between the soul and God with the soul desiring to root itself in God’s will.  I think Amoris Laetitia calls us all—not only the divorced and remarried—to do just that: with rigorously honest hearts to conform our actions to the will of God as best as we can discern, and leave the laws and prescripts to the scribes and the Pharisees who choose to live by law rather than by grace. Häring was pushed into a gentle exile by Cardinal Ratzinger in the John Paul years.  His methodology was seen as too dangerous to the sort of authority Rome wanted to exercise.  I think that in many ways, Amoris Laetitia is a vindication of the contribution of Bernard Häring and a signal we are back on track.