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.
