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Michael Dougherty’s review in
the National Review of Ross Douthtat’s To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism begins with Douthat’s recounting of the proceedings of the two-year Synod on the
Family in 2014-15, characterized by Douthat as exhibiting “ugly
maneuvering and wheedling of the Synod’s progressives, and the alternating
attempts at flattery and bold confrontation by the Synod’s conservatives, all
over theological concepts….” Michael Sean Winters of the heterodox
National Catholic Reporter screed unsurprisingly offers another reiew of the book, claiming Douthat's "facts are nonsense, his
arguments tendentious, and his thesis so absurd it is shocking, absolutely
shocking, that no one over at Simon & Schuster thought to ask if what he
writes is completely or only partially unhinged."
I assume Mr. Winters was
referring to Dougherty's synopsis of Douthat:
Francis
closed the proceedings of the first year’s synod with a speech that sought a
middle ground between the two factions, placing himself at the center. At the
close of the second year’s synod, the pope, obviously frustrated that his
desired language had not received approval, thundered openly and hysterically
against the conservatives.
With
the subsequent papal document Amoris Laetitia (2016), Francis
and his fellow progressive reformers sought to institute a legal and official
way of granting Holy Communion to those who live in a state of life the Church
traditionally recognizes as adultery, without calling them to repent and reconcile
with their first spouse or to live “as brother and sister” in their new
household. This debate has opened up rhetorical tools the Church seemed to have
put away: bishops charging other bishops with heresy, or with schismatical
disobedience to the Roman pontiff.
Ah, "a legal and official
way of granting Holy Communion to those who live in a state of life the Church
traditionally recognizes as adultery, without calling them to repent and
reconcile with their first spouse or to live “as brother and sister” in their
new household." It is no surprise that many Catholics are in violation of
traditional Church teaching on the sanctity of marriage- does the fault lie
with these folks, or with Jesus teaching on marriage, upheld for centuries by
the Bridegroom of Christ? Many Catholics, after all, "have not
received" the message of the Sermon on the Mount. If the sheep do not recognize the voice of
the shepherd here, perhaps it isn’t the shepherd speaking? The heterodox on
marriage, who never miss a chance to stress that Catholicism is all about the
Beatitudes, would disagree. I do not think Our Lord’s teaching on either
subject is any less binding on the faithful—one may not "pick and
choose," cafeteria style, as do the heterodox, which of The Church's
teachings bind them.
Douthat suggests that the
neomodernists at the Synod sought a “pastoral” change, not a doctrinal one, and
so would in their view not be changing Catholic morality, teaching but its
application. Very disingenuous. Their reasoning in effect would alter the moral
law into a system of lovely but impossible moral ideals that could only be approximated by
the faithful, never fully practiced, even with God’s grace. The practical
effect of this alteration in revealed truth is to disregard Christ’s command to
“repent and believe in the Gospel,” an emasculation of the magisterium of the
Church. Douthat writes:
This is where Francis-era liberal
Catholicism has so often ended up in arguments that imply that the Church must use Jesus to go
beyond Jesus, as it were, using his approach to the ritual law as a means to
evade or qualify the moral law, which means essentially evading or qualifying
his own explicit commandments, and declaring them a pharisaism that the
late-modern Church should traffic in no more. To fulfill Jesus’s mission, to
follow the Jesus of faith, even the Jesus of Scripture must be left behind.”
Gnostic, to say the least.
My only disagreement with this
is that this is hardly “Francis-era” Catholicism, but is the neomodernist
heresy which has existed since the 19th century in the Body of
Christ much as the weeds among the wheat. The wisdom of Pope St. John Paul II
the Great in Familiaris Consortio is
pertinent:
Not infrequently ideas
and solutions which are very appealing but which obscure in varying degrees the
truth and the dignity of the human person, are offered to the men and women of
today, in their sincere and deep search for a response to the important daily
problems that affect their married and family life. (FC, 4)
Remember, the Council of Trent had proclaimed the
indissolubility of marriage as a dogma. Thus, entering a new union after a
civil divorce, or continuing a sexual relationship in this new union, is a
grave sin. This has consequences for the Eucharist: as all Catholics should
know or have taught to them, whoever is aware of having committed a grave sin
can only receive Communion if he has been to Confession, has confessed and has
been absolved. This teaching has been reaffirmed in recent decades by Pope St John
Paul II, Benedict XVI and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
However, in the aftermath of Pope Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia, some bishops have said that the divorced and
civilly remarried can receive Communion, on the basis of the document’s
ambiguous footnote 351. At
present Dougherty thinks the Church is at a stalemate on the controversy produced by Amoris Laetitia and that Pope Francis is
playing a longer game in his ability to shape the College of Cardinals and to
choose bishops who favor the document.
Douthat writes of a generational conflict within Catholicism:
The real Francis legacy might be less a swiftly unfolding
progressive revolution than a new impasse. He could leave liberal Catholicism
with control of the most important levers of power within the Church — but
without having solved its longstanding manpower-and-enthusiasm problem. There
might be fewer cardinals equipped to stop his would-be heirs — but also too few
priests enthusiastic about following them.
Dougherty notes that this
generational conflict is a common theme of Francis’s own pronouncements, which “frequently
pit young, fire-breathing priests who want to protect tradition and orthodoxy
against wise old clerics who know how to be merciful”.
Should this be true and
persist, wherein the Church is “more defined by its complex inner polemics and
theological civil wars, the result would damage the Church’s mission.
As I
observed reception of Holy Communion this Easter past, I noted that 100% of those
in attendance received the Body of Christ. I am also sure that this was the
case in many parishes attending Easter Masses in the U.S., and throughout the world.
Are we to believe that all of these parishioners were in a state of Grace, or
that some were guilty of sins that in the orthodox
understanding would bar them from Communion? Could it be so that this tireless abandonment
of the Church’s official sacramental discipline has prompted the shepherds to
issue the reforming theological formulas that would justify it? This would avoid the hypocrisy of announcing
one doctrine all the while practicing quite another.
It is pressing upon the
shepherd to work up the courage to tell the truth from the pulpit and the
confessional. While we are well aware of the Lord’s assurance that the gates of
hell shall not prevail against the Church, bishops must stop using it as an
excuse to run from their responsibility according to Vatican II to catechize
their flocks according to the tradition of the Apostles, a fight with the
salvation of souls hanging in the balance.
Dougherty posits that Douthat’s
book, which begins on a personal note, speaks for all Catholics who through
experience have found in the unchanging doctrine of marriage a credible witness
of God’s mercy in our age, but who fear that a Church obsessed with making the
sheep feel “welcome” would bless the sins that alienate them from their broken
families.
Dougherty closes with the most profound
question for our time: “If the Church is, as Scripture says, the Bride of
Christ, how will the Bridegroom react to finding his beloved thinking so fondly
of divorce and remarriage?”
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