“Bonkers,” is the only word for the week that was, especially on the Catholic news beat, and with particular regard for a set of official questions called dubia in the technical language of ecclesialese.
For those of you following from home, a dubium is a query concerning some more-or-less technical matter of doctrine or legal interpretation. Dubia usually come from senior churchmen with care of souls, who want to know the mind of the pope either as teacher or legislator, or both.
The standard practice is to couch the questions in a way that admits of a “Yes” or “No” answer, but that is to make it easier for the department official who actually fields the question to give a straightforward answer. Frequently, the Y or N reply receives some elaboration.
This past week, we learned about a set of dubia submitted to Pope Francis – the third such or similar set from a consistent group of cardinal doubters (ahem) – concerning a set of issues that have been grist for the mill since the pope’s 2016 post-Synodal Exhortation, Amoris laetitia. The first set of dubia (in)famously received no direct answer. A second set, different and framed in light of the synod assembly on synodality that opened last week and runs through the end of the month, did get a response in July of this year.
The cardinal doubters sat on those responses for well over two months. They didn’t like the formal structure of them – they weren’t Yes / No answers – but that wasn’t the only reason they kept them to themselves. In all fairness to the group of five who submitted the questions, the custom is for the pope and the Vatican to publish responses to dubia when and how they will.
In any case, the cardinals reformulated their questions so they could only receive a Y/N response, and resubmitted them. When they received no reply to their reformulated questions, they went public with them and let the public know that they had received responses to an earlier set of similar questions. The Vatican responded in short order, publishing the responses Pope Francis had given privately back in July.
A meltdown ensued, helped by Catholic and mainstream secular news outlets but driven mostly by a commentariat delirious with desire to have the pope say what they want him to say, either because they hope he will finally unambiguously get behind their pet causes or else finally and unambiguously declare himself to be just the kind of heretic they know him in their bones to be.
The whole spectacle was the very opposite of edifying.
When the crazy is turned up to eleven, the best thing to do is take a beat, find the core of quiet, and practice cold, hard analysis. That’s what I’ll try to do here, but let a fellow have his fun. Three refrains from pop songs – two classics and one current chart-topper – will frame my considerations.
You can’t always get what you want.
Whatever else Pope Francis has done by answering the dubia – not the old dubia, but the latest dubia – he has shown once again that he is a political master. He may have been counting on the dubia cardinals to do themselves dirty, but whether he was or he wasn’t, both the cardinal-doubters themselves and their coterie of malcontents certainly forgot the moral of The Rolling Stones’ 1969 hit, “You can’t always get what you want,” which is that you can get what you need – sometimes, anyway – if you try.
Right from the outset, the dubia cardinals have maintained that their chief concern is with doctrinal integrity. They have sought clear, unambiguous, unequivocal statements from the highest authority in the Church regarding what most folks understood to be settled points of teaching until Francis’s 2016 post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris laetitia, muddied the waters.
That’s not to say the dubia cardinals are without pastoral concerns. Quite the opposite, in fact. Doctrine has always been the firm foundation of pastoral practice, or if you will, the reliable chart by which one proceeds through dangerous waters. The Pope and his gang have been behaving as though the charts don’t matter.
Now, the waters may have changed and the charts we have may not be perfectly reliable. Charts never are perfectly reliable. There may be new soundings, or it may be time to take new soundings. The pope and his guys, however, appear to be operating without a care for charts at all, willing to pilot by something between instinct and intuition. They are also moving at speed through waters everyone knows are dangerous.
Even if it is occasionally necessary for a pilot to steer by sight and feel, it is always unwise to ignore the charts and madness to think that charts as such are unnecessary.
In fairness to Pope Francis, he is an uncannily gifted pilot of small craft. In one-on-one or small group settings, he is tremendously effective. The Hulu documentary that came out earlier this year will amply demonstrate his prowess in such situations to anyone willing to see it. Whether you prefer to think of the whole Church as a great galleon from the age of sail or a battleship or a liner or even an aircraft carrier, the one thing the barque of Peter isn’t, is small.
All this is to say that a merely candid view of the controversy will apprehend that there is tension between the pope and the dubia cardinals, who are nevertheless neither necessarily nor irreducibly opposed to one another over the paramount question of salus animarum, salvation of souls.
If the pope is a better small craft pilot than his implacable critics are willing to concede, folks on the other side would do well to let themselves see that the dubia cardinals have a better brief against the pope’s pilotage of the great ship that is the Church than they have heretofore recognized.
I’m not going to rehash the whole business. Suffice it to say that Pope Francis intended Amoris to be an official encouragement for the whole Church: an invitation to discernment, if you will, a conversation-starter that was supposed to get folks thinking – together and publicly – about a whole host of challenges to contemporary family life.
Instead, lots of Church jurisdictions decided to skip the talking and go straight to the part where local bishops issued “pastoral guidelines” amounting to a jumble of special legislation, no one piece of which really squared with any other. The bitter irony of that was twofold.
It poisoned the well, giving Pope Francis’s erstwhile champions in the chattering classes carte blanche to attack the genuinely perplexed and tar them with the “dissenter” brush, while simultaneously giving the pope’s implacable critics plenty at which to point and say – ipsa voce – “See?!? This confusion is what he wants!”
The conversation Francis said he wanted was supposed to help break out of excessive formalism and legal rigorism. Instead, the jump to special legislation effectively short circuited that effort, and almost nobody wondered how more legislation (or quasi-legislation) was supposed to combat excessive formalism or legal rigorism.
The problem Amoris kicked into overdrive, in other words, was never really one of doctrine at all, but of governance.
If the dubia cardinals were politically savvy themselves, they’d have published the responses they had back in July, declared victory, and gone home. They didn’t get everything they wanted. Doctrinally, however, they got everything they needed.
Distilled to their essence, the answers that came to the dubia cardinals in July did clarify all the fundamental questions that have arisen regarding settled Church teaching – from the perennial validity and “controlling” status of previous papal and conciliar magisterium, to more granular particulars like the need for some expression of repentance in order for a priest to give sacramental absolution and the Church’s inability to confer the Sacrament of Holy Orders on women – even and especially regarding the vexata quaestio of blessings to same-sex unions.
The answer to that last one was, in sum: No, you can’t bless unions as though they were marriages when they aren’t, but you should try to give blessings to people when they ask for them.
That’s not great, especially in light of the practice – increasingly common and at least semi-officially endorsed in certain jurisdictions – of either blessing unions that make a mockery of marriage or else blessing persons in those unions not only without adequately explaining what the blessing is and is not doing but essentially winking and nodding at the unions themselves.
No purely doctrinal pronouncement was ever going to stop that, no matter who is pope.
By insisting on another round of dubia after they didn’t like the formal structure of the answers they got, the dubia cardinals behaved like tinhorns or wet-behind-the-ears attorneys demanding – in front of a jury – that the judge reconsider, rather than seasoned trial lawyers who know that you raise an objection once to preserve the record and then move to the next thing. Insisting only shows the jury that you’re really upset and maybe a little afraid.
(Something not unlike this is a plot point for the trio of JAG lawyers who constitute the defense team in Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of A Few Good Men. One difference between the cinematic object lesson and real life is that the dubia cardinals got much more satisfactory answers from Pope Francis than the defense team for Cpl. Dawson and Pvt. Downey got from the judge, but I digress.)
The separate answers to Cardinal Duka’s dubia – did I not mention those? – arguably go even further toward preserving doctrine and even conceding significant ancillary points of criticism leveled at Amoris, namely that the document was poorly drafted and inadequately edited. They also expose the technocratic – not to say “micromanaging” – approach of Pope Francis’s chosen lieutenants, chiefly his new doctrine czar, Cardinal Victor Fernandez.
Most of that got mostly lost in the maelstrom that was last week.
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Pope Francis also made it clear to anyone with eyes to see that his erstwhile supporters – many of them at least in the chattering classes – are perfectly willing to use him as an instrument of their own policy agendas quite apart, and in fact regardless, of what the pope actually thinks and really says.
This was nowhere more crystalline than in the case of the response Pope Francis gave to a dubium regarding the practice of blessing same-sex unions.
“The Church has a very clear understanding of marriage,” the pope’s response began, “an exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to procreation. Only this union can be called ‘marriage’.” One may quibble with the manner and extent to which “other forms of union” may “realize” such a union, even “only in a partial and analogous way.” In any case, no union that is not marriage can be strictly called marriage.
Nor is this a mere matter of semantics.
“[T]he reality we call marriage,” Pope Francis continues, “has a unique essential constitution that requires an exclusive name, not applicable to other realities.” Crucially – and in answer to another vexed question that arose from the Amoris kerfuffle, “[Marriage] is undoubtedly much more than a mere ‘ideal’,” for which reason “the Church avoids any type of rite or sacramental that might contradict this conviction and suggest that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.”
The pope’s response goes on for two more paragraphs, the copious and very much non-linear verbiage of which boils down to: Don’t bless unions as though they were marriages when they aren’t, but bless people who ask for it whenever you can and look for reasons to bless everyone who asks.
There’s a lot to criticize in that approach. At the very least, it gives plausible cover – indeed, it appears to be giving instructions – to people who would bless unions on how to explain themselves and/or justify their actions to “rigid” and “backwardist” ecclesiastical superiors.
One thinks of Belgium, where the Flemish bishops have already published a blessing text. The wording of the response would seem to pump the brakes on their initiative, except they already got a wink and a nod from Francis for their initiative.
In Germany, where the Church is flush with government cash for the time being but is also bleeding members and at risk of seeing the government spigot turned off permanently – something that would have significant repercussions for Rome, which relies on German Church money – blessings of people and unions have received more-or-less official approval in various jurisdictions.
Then again, Germans have been causing trouble for civilization since the Teutoburg Forest disaster. “Germans get up to stuff that’s financially squirrelly and doctrinally suspect” is the quintessence of “dog bites man” newsworthiness.
That Pope Francis appears willing to let them do so is regrettable perhaps, but hardly the worst thing. His implacable critics – not the dubia cardinals themselves, but their mostly self-appointed acolytes and cheerleaders – preferred instead to pursue their pound of rhetorical flesh with this latest round of dubia, tying themselves in knots to make Francis plainly say something he plainly didn’t.
Elements in the Church and in secular media that have adopted or co-opted Francis – frequently with his connivance – for their pet social causes, well, they have done much the same from the other side.
There are different ways to slice the answer Pope Francis gave to the question regarding same-sex blessings. “Asked and answered by the CDF,” would have been fine for me and better than the answer that came. Francis’s rambling made the practical, nuts-and-bolts governance problem worse for everybody. It was always going to do that. He was never going to be the guy who governed well or wisely.
Anyone touting the response as any sort of opening to a change in Church teaching on marriage or the fundamental nature of conjugal relationship in general, however, is basically the ecclesiastical version of Lloyd Christmas when he took the gentle but unmistakable rebuff he’d just had from Mary Swanson and rejoined, “So, you’re saying there’s a chance?”
Whether for deluded desire or fear and loathing, folks on just about every side of this contretemps are at best guilty of wishful thinking.
That’s why the lyric for this turn is from Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” – released as a single in the spring of 1969 and included on Bridge over Troubled Water about a year later – a tremendous lament of discontented civility. “I am just a poor boy,” the song begins, “Though my story’s seldom told,” and then:
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises;
All lies and jest,
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.
One ought to resist every temptation to wax maudlin, but frankly the whole business is depressing. One is given to think the people on every side of Pope Francis rather more interested in manufacturing controversy than they are in doing pretty much anything else.
I should’ve known it was strange…
As John L. Allen Jr. pointed out in his analysis column dealing with this dreadful business last week, these latest dubia are not so much real questions as they are a rhetorical exercise – like academics at a conference Q&A session after a paper, who offer their own take in a lengthy preface to something that may or may not end in a formal query but really doesn’t call for an answer – designed to register points regardless of whether it succeeds in clarifying any genuine issue.
Allen also points out that the one thing Pope Francis surely has done by answering the July dubia and publishing the answers just ahead of the synod’s opening is to “scramble the deck” ahead of the assembly that has been billed as “the greatest listening exercise in the history of the Church” and the capstone of Francis’s pontificate, apt to chart the Church’s course into the third millennium.
That’s a tall order.
How anyone could possibly be taken in by the overblown, oversold, super-hyped synod proposition is beyond me. “Sell the sizzle, not the steak,” is the old marketing adage, and it is fine. Only, there has to be a steak. This gathering of prelates and various other invited guests – stakeholders and experts and sundry amici curiae – was never going to be too much different from any of the other highly managed and meticulously packaged affairs that have given the mitred classes and their retainers an excuse to haunt the bars and restaurants of the Borgo Pio for a few glorious weeks of ottobrata romana for nearly sixty years.
Pope Francis may well have big stuff in store for later, after the curtain has dropped and everyone has gone home. There could be some drama during the three weeks of sessions this month. The whole show isn’t slated to wrap until 2024, after a final gathering. So far, the business has been predictably farcical.
There was a gag order put on participants and a press blackout on synod sessions that the synod managers from Francis on down tried to sell as “fasting” and a form of “ascesis” apt to encourage a posture of listening among the participants themselves. After one big wig – Cardinal Gerhard Müller – did his own thing with EWTN, gag orders and blackouts be damned, the head of the Vatican’s communications dicastery, Paolo Ruffini, announced that the gag order wasn’t an order at all but “a personal discernment the pope asked of the members.”
“The discernment is left to each individual person,” Ruffini explained. “[I]t’s not that there’s a gendarme that punishes,” the loose-lipped, Ruffini told journalists.
“Gotta laugh at the stupidity,” sings the talented 20-year-old Disney alumna, Olivia Rodrigo, on her smash hit “Vampire” – the lead single on her sophomore album, GUTS – an instant Gen Z anthem sung from the sadder but wiser girl’s point-of-view.
Speaking of guts, it took some for the dubia cardinals to press their case, whatever you think of it.
It is fair to note that they published the second set only after they didn’t receive a response. The Pope could have let them know he’d received their second set of dubia and considered his responses to the first set sufficient and the whole matter therefore closed.
It is worth mentioning in this connection that the whole template and modus operandi for ecclesiastical business – basically to keep everything secret until the final outcome, and maybe not tell anyone what we decided or how we reached our decision even then – is utterly disastrous.
Confidentiality is necessary, but it is always in service to the integrity of processes – judicial, administrative, political as they may be – and always is in tension with the right of the governed to know the character and conduct of their governors. The management of that tension is a matter of discretion, which is impossible to learn, let alone practice, in a climate of poisonous secrecy.
Perhaps the anthem of this epoch really ought to be “Sweet Little Lies” by Fleetwood Mac.
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Bergoglio and his minions won’t simply declare that the Church can’t bless homosexual fornication. This legitimization of it is outrageous and scandalous.
We can know through both Faith and Reason informed by The Catholic Faith that it is not possible to have Sacramental Communion without Ecclesial Communion, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost; It Is “Through, With, And In Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost” (Filioque), that Holy Mother Church, The One Body Of Christ, outside of which there is no Salvation due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque) exists.
Jorge Bergoglio’s apostasy was external and made public and notorious, when as a cardinal, he stated in his book, On Heaven and Earth, in regards to same-sex sexual relationships, and thus same-sex sexual acts, prior to his election as pope, on page 117, denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), and demonstrating that he does not hold, keep, or teach The Catholic Faith, and he continues to act accordingly:
“If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage, there could be children affected. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help shape their identity.”- Jorge Bergoglio, denying The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and the fact that God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), Is The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, while denying sin done in private is sin, ipso facto, separating himself from Christ and His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church
How then, can the election of a man, who was not in communion with Christ and every other previously validly elected Pope, and is thus anti Pope and anti Filioque, possibly be valid?
“It is a sin to accommodate an occasion of sin, and cooperate with that which is the evil.”
CCC II. THE DEFINITION OF SIN
“1849 Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been defined as “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.”121
1850 Sin is an offense against God: “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in your sight.”122 Sin sets itself against God’s love for us and turns our hearts away from it. Like the first sin, it is disobedience, a revolt against God through the will to become “like gods,”123 knowing and determining good and evil. Sin is thus “love of oneself even to contempt of God.”124 In this proud self- exaltation, sin is diametrically opposed to the obedience of Jesus, which achieves our salvation.125
1851 It is precisely in the Passion, when the mercy of Christ is about to vanquish it, that sin most clearly manifests its violence and its many forms: unbelief, murderous hatred, shunning and mockery by the leaders and the people, Pilate’s cowardice and the cruelty of the soldiers, Judas’ betrayal – so bitter to Jesus, Peter’s denial and the disciples’ flight. However, at the very hour of darkness, the hour of the prince of this world,126 the sacrifice of Christ secretly becomes the source from which the forgiveness of our sins will pour forth inexhaustibly.”
It is a sin to accomodate an occasion of sin, and thus cooperate with evils.”
Regardless of the actors or the actors desires, the desire to engage in a sinful act of any nature, does not change the essence of the sinful act.
There are some that lament this Pope and his atrocity against Catholicism as grounds to argue for sedevacantism. I think they might be on to something, but in my opinion they are a bit late to the party. I believe the man himself refuses to sit in Peter’s Chair. What do you do with that? He is his own sedevacantist. Here is a man claiming the title while disregarding the responsibility. I know him to be the pope, perhaps the Frank-n-pope, but still the pope. He has set the bar so low for papal achievement it’s not even possible for him to slither under it now. That said, I pray for his awakening. I value his soul as a child of God and I mourn for the Novus Ordo Church and the direction he is taking it and the “faithful”.
So here we have another half baked person putting forth his unlearned and irresponsible “canon lawyers opinion” that Francis is an anti pope, has committed apostasy, blah blah blah. This is all rather funny, since someone else would have noticed that Francis was an antipope, or a heretic, or apostate if he really was. These nutty opinions are NOT valid, but these people with large opinions apparently seek to impress the unknowledgeable, not the informed.
It is NOT legitimised!
Olivia Rodrigo?
Thanks Mr. Altieri. My personal impression of the original responses was that they weren’t near as bad as either knee-jerk conservatives immediately called them or the five cardinals seemed to think by their insistence on “yes or no” answers, although I did think the homosexual blessing response was deliberately vague. I just don’t understand why Francis lets the Church and his time be high-jacked by the fallen sexual proclivities of a relatively small group of people when other things needing immediate attention – one thinks of the plight of Christians being persecuted and killed world-wide – seem to me to be far more important. Let the homosexuals bugger one another from now until doomsday, and their clerical allies shower them with faux blessings, I’d rather Francis focus on the innocent and who desperately need his help and on parts of the world other than the decadent west. And now there is the absurdity that a synod is focusing on in-house dis-agreements while the Holy Land itself is blowing up. It would be humorous if it weren’t tragic.
To affirm the accommodation and toleration of sexual acts that demean the inherent Dignity of a beloved son or daughter, and are thus sinful. is to deny The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament Of Holy Matrimony, and the inherent Dignity of being in essence, a beloved man and woman, united in marriage as husband and wife, while denying God’s Call To Holiness, is a Call to be chaste in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds, as “Temples Of The Holy Spirit”.
If you are with Christ, you will not tolerate or accommodate sin, you will desire that all sinners repent.
At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved.
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
“Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.”
Yes and No answers are very often not enough. Especially in this. It is not a question like: Do you like ice-cream? Yes or no.
The Pope has said so many times what marriage is and what it Is not. He also has said so many times that marriage can ONLY be between a man and a woman. It is the natural law. He also said that homosexuals are NOT EVIL. They are also children of God and have to be treated with love and respect just like anybody else. The ACT is EVIL and unacceptable , because it is against natural law.
We read: “Whether you prefer to think of the whole Church as a great galleon from the age of sail or a battleship or a liner or even an aircraft carrier, the one thing the Barque of Peter isn’t, is small.”
Well, you got my attention with “aircraft carrier.” As a Jack-of-some-trades but not many, in 1969-70, yours truly served as a very junior officer on an aircraft carrier. And, was bridge-qualified as an Officer of the Deck Underway (OOD, and at the age of twenty-five, was arguably the youngest Senior OOD on an aircraft carrier in the history of the United States Navy).
Applicable are certain realities especially for, say, “bridge” teams…
For example, regardless of two ships’ headings, “a constant bearing and decreasing range” is a COLLISION COURSE. Likewise with icebergs. No margin for business-as-usual any benefit-of-the-doubt. So, “Gentlemen, attention to detail; a collision at sea can ruin your whole day!” Visiting the bridge, even senior officers, four-stripers, sometimes freeze when given a simple cross-training task, like verbally ordering a slight change in rudder command.
Which brings us to the two Synods and their senior officers, or “leadership,” or whatever…
Over a decade prior to the sinking of the unsinkable “TITANIC,” a fiction novel in 1898 (“Futility”) depicted an earlier large passenger liner named the “Titan.” Yea, verily, on the later Titanic (or the later and second Synod on Synodality?) the foreseeable collision and sinking “came to pass.”
Of the nearly identical TWO SHIPS (Synods?), the Titan was 800 feet long, the Titanic 882; top speeds, each 25 knots; passengers 2,000 vs 2,200; displacement 70,000 tons vs 66,000; lifeboats (read “backwards” dioceses?) 24 vs 20; watertight bulkheads 19 vs 15 (vs welcoming of “non-synodal” Germania?); the side fatally striking the iceberg, both starboard. And, both on the maiden voyage (as in new-speak synodality?).
Altieri’s article leads one to ask: for a Church so committed to the concrete over the allegedly “abstract,” why so little attention to cumulative details of mis-governance?
What, really, about the dubia? Constant bearing, decreasing range.
Thank you for your service to God, and to our Country, with the Hope and Prayer that this Country returns to our Founding Judeo-Christian Principles, Endowed to us From The Father, Through The Son, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque).
Peter,
Please cast my net for a lifeboat catch. For good measure, haul me in a life preserver…neoprene, please. [For by the same measure, by which ye mete, it shall be meted again to you.] Thanks!
The Rolling Stones quote is most appropriate.
Recall the title of one of their most popular albums, ‘Sympathy For The Devil’.
“…stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.”
“Free Man in Paris,” Joni Mitchell
A clarification regarding “dubia”: They need not come from prelates (and generally don’t) and most often are not directed to a pope. Usually, they are directed to a dicastery with competence over the matter of concern.
I think “is 2000 years of Catholic doctrine, predicated on the very words of Christ, false?” is a very reasonable question. It is in fact a binary question so why wouldn’t the pope’s henchman satisfy the request?
Pope Francis is simultaneously “a political master” and “was never going to be the guy who governed well or wisely”. Um, what? How do you square that circle? I’m leaning more toward the second analysis than the first, because how is kicking a problem of governance into overdrive politically savvy. That is a fine insight into Amoris, btw, and it fits well with the interpretation of PF a a guy who always cares more about what is to be done than how it is to be explained. Then again, if the leader who gave us the slogan “reality is greater than ideas” is the same guy who was never going to govern well or wisely, then I suppose the Church we have today is nothing or less than what we should expect.
A few good points but this article over-emphasizes the “political” ramifications and glosses over the elephant in the room; the gross confusion of the faithful regarding numerous statements, actions, policies coming forth these days from Rome. Clarification is needed now more than anything. It must be made clear that perennial Catholic teaching is not just observed in a strict, technical sense, but truly honored in spirit and in truth. That SS blessings are distinguished somehow from marriage isn’t all that important. Is sin being “blessed” in clear contradiction to Catholic teaching as clearly set forth in clear language in papal documents from St. John Paul II as well as Benedict XVI?
Frankly who cares how politically astute or clever anyone is? If clarity and a resolve to affirm all of Catholic teaching on marriage and sin itself isn’t forthcoming, confusion will continue to spread, to the harm of the faithful and to all who might otherwise be drawn to the Catholic faith.
We wouldn’t need all these “dubia” and Synodaling if God would stop being so Perfect.
my oh my!, nice distraction…I did not realize just how infallible you believe to be…
There are 2 things you never want to see made: laws and sausage. Now, add a third: synodling.
Perhaps everyone involved has been smoking too many dubiae?
I almost injured myself laughing at that one. I needed that. The laugh, not the near injury.
Perhaps the end times are yet in the future seeing that the Church still has the luxury of in-fighting. All this will be irrelevant once the screws begin to tighten down and the blood begins to flow. May God have mercy on us if we have another Conclave and a new Pope. But, yes the barque WILL stay afloat and we will have a Peter at the helm, and perhaps we will even come full circle and have another Jew at the wheel!
I do wish CWR’s articles and comments would generally (with some exceptions) adhere to a verbal limit.
Although I am a bit of a reading addict myself, even I don’t always have the patience to slog through some of these longer articles and comments.
My two cents’ worth.
Why do we have to put up with this? Peter is supposed to uphold the Faith, clearly. No wonder half of Catholic marriages end in divorce and the birth rate is 1.6 per woman, same as everybody else. And why haven’t any pro-abort politicians — Biden, Pelosi, Newsom — been excommunicated for being hyper-pro-abort? The next pope will have to clear all this up or the Church will splinter as never before.
It seems that the interpretation of the modernists and that of the ultra-traditionalists is always the same, that is, it is the same “modernist interpretation”: modernists praise the Pope, and ultra-conservatives reject him. Unlike both heretical currents, the Catholic position is to strive to interpret the words of the Pope by recognizing who has expressed them: the Vicar of Christ.
Yes, thank you, I agree, Paolo. This article told me a couple things I didn’t already know: 1) Dubia are usually phrased as Y/N questions. It helps to know that because the Y/N proposition sounded patronizing and lecture-y otherwise. 2) The observation that Pope Francis is really good at handling small boats but not large ships. That is a charitable way of thinking about it. I think people got used to JPII’s and Benedict XVI’s clarity and got spoiled. Jesus didn’t promise us that all of His appointees would be like those two. We were spoiled and now some conservatives are acting like spoiled children when something is taken away. Whining. The fact that we have a normal, imperfect Pope who hasn’t figured out how to shepherd well in a digital age speaks volumes about the immeasurable condescension of God, which is always immeasurable even when we have pretty competent men in the Chair of Peter.
The thing to do is listen (oh, sorry, that’s a Francis word), and try to play off the good that Pope Francis brings to the table. He’s not good at directing huge organizations, ok. Modernists are creating egregious spin and it’s painful to watch people being misled, ok, but we had 25 years of popes teaching clearly, and that didn’t change the minds of the modernist pundits. What Pope Francis did is he prophetically announced a period of Mercy, and exhorted us to pray for Mercy. Are we doing this, or just arguing? If we listen, we see Pope Francis is gently pointing out that mercy does not mean license, so we have to ponder and ask Jesus what He is asking for. It’s hard to ignore the modernists who are hearing what they want to hear and trumpeting it, but if we pray and listen quietly, perhaps the Lord will show us how to truly reach people who have lost their identity and and are hurting. The best thing to do right now is to figure out how to serve in a field hospital full of broken people (including ourselves), and to do it well. Doing more of that will answer the modernizers better than any debate. Talking won’t change minds, actions will.
I was floored when I read a short background of what led up to the Sacred Heart apparitions. In “Consoling the Heart of Jesus” Fr. Michael Gaitley explains (if I remember correctly) that in southern France, there were two bishops who were preaching that people needed to be totally without sin, and without attachment to sin, in order to receive the Eucharist. One bishop had bragged that no one had come forward to receive, except for the priests, in the past year in his diocese. Then, as Fr. Gaitley explains, Jesus “snapped” and had to appear and tell people how much He was longing to come to them. I was floored to think that one could be born and die in your little village in southern France, and be taught complete error and believe it for your whole lifetime, possibly, before this was corrected. This is the immeasurable condescension of Jesus, to work with a hot mess like us over all these centuries. And yet He does. He factors in our idiocy and condescends to keep working with us. And He will get us through this time.
We can expect Pope Francis to do exactly what he’s been doing. We already know his style. He’s not suddenly going to get better at confronting the modernizers and he’s not suddenly going to come out and approve of blessing same sex unions. He’s going to repeat Church teaching in his quiet way, and he’s not going to deliberately teach error. So what does Jesus want out of this situation? Jesus and the Godhead allowed this man to be Pope. Perhaps God wants us to stop arguing and start figuring out how to better serve people who are suffering in knowing who they are. There’s more to it than just stating the truth, there’s more we can do.
First, Altieri seems to ascribe some deviousness to the five dubia cardinals, because they did not publish the Pope’s answers to this dubia. But of course, the usual course of action is that the Vatican makes public all these dubia and the answers, and publishes them on their web page as a matter of course. But the strange one, Pope Francis, did not publish anything, leaving the dubia cardinals in a bind. Did the Vatican want to keep the answers secret for some reason? So they did the right thing, and did not publish the Pope’s answers. This may have been a kindess, because the Pope’s answers were unbelievably stupid. “You can not bless homosexual unions if people are led to think this is a blessing of a marriage.” Not helpful, does not answer the question. Previously, Francis said clearly “You cannot bless sin”. Now he is saying, “Nevermind, you can bless sin all you want as long as you say “We are blessing sinful, repeated homosexual acts such as anal sex here, NOT a marriage!”
Well, that’s a relief!
Francis is a goofball, definitely unworthy of the job.
“By insisting on another round of dubia after they didn’t like the formal structure of the answers they got, the dubia cardinals behaved like tinhorns or wet-behind-the-ears attorneys demanding…”
Nonsense. The original answers did not shed any light on the questions asked. Basically, the answers were stupid and non Catholic: “Do whatever you want to do” they basically said, “Maybe it will be OK, and maybe it will not be OK, it all depends” That was the nature of the “guidance” from the Pope. It was like somebody issued a dubia saying “My wife is annoying the hell out of me. Can I murder her?” And Francis answers, “you must discern whether killing her is the right course of action. Every situation is different”
No, the second attempt at the dubia was the right thing to do. They asked clearer questions, much harder to get around. But did Francis send them back a letter? Even one saying, Sorry, I already answered this” No, great dialogue master Francis simply ignored them, because the questions, if answered would have revealed his absolute ignorance of Catholic teaching.
Ever since GK Chesterton spoke so intuitively about the condition of our age:
“When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
We’ve been living in a world of “diminishing returns”. The human person can only believe for so long that up is really down, or that male is really female, or that the Covid shot will stop the spread of the virus, or any other number of things more consistent with an agenda, than reality. Every time the powers that be, in politics, culture, entertainment, religion, etc., want to push a false agenda, propaganda or indoctrination, the result is “diminishing returns” as fewer and fewer people will find their judgments worthy of relevance. Sadly, with so many people now living in some alter-reality, i.e. Marxism, Materialism, Modernism, et alio, we’re rapidly approaching the abyss of meaning, purpose and life. I suspect at that point, we will have had enough of the non-sense and return to reality. Let’s hope so!
Sweet Little Lies, Altieri’s literal bottom line appears to reference Francis Uno’s timing and disclosure of responses, keeping the cardinals and the Czech bishop off balance. Although his previous description of His Holiness’ helsmanship sailing through dangerous waters would include the content of the responses. Neither here nor there seemingly upholding doctrine then adding ways to disregard doctrine [is the issue primarily governance?]. Far more significant though related. It reveals the author’s concern is likened to the rest of the concerned.