I am not willing at all to add my name to the list of “sure I know better than the man God gave the job to” at any level, though I do my level best to learn the best I can and to be prepared to teach.
Learning to trust God to make the details sort is a long ways better than being sucked into a doctrinal and rhetorical bellum omnium contra omnes. To be frank, that is the maelstrom I left when I left Protestantism to seek full Communion with the Church. I left behind “denominations” and embraced Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, including the possibility that the Church would learn from the deposit of faith and carefully define truths that the faithful should firmly hold.
I professed in haec fide vivere et mori statuo, and I do not regret it.
O MY GOD, I firmly believe that Thou art one God in three divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; I believe that Thy divine Son became man and died for our sins, and that He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all the truths which the holy Catholic Church teaches, because Thou hast revealed them, Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived. Amen.
(source: Virtutes Theologicae)
As an RCIA Coordinator, I have worked hard not to bemoan the Church’s clear teaching, but to explain it; not to soft-sell or merely assert, but to provide the groundwork. My goal is for the Catechumens and Candidates that have been entrusted to me not to merely check boxes of awareness, nor to blindly assent to what anyone may say, but to be fully open to the grace of God to be conferred in the Sacraments of Initiation, well-disposed to receive those Sacraments.
I have done my level best to ensure that they receive the Tradition in its own proper intelligibility, neither with unreasoning emotion nor with rationalistic aridity:
And, like any teacher, I am jealous of them, easily inflamed against any influence that will snatch the truth they’ve only just grasped away from them. I have taken extra time and care to discuss the Natural Law with them, and to strengthen their understanding of the Sacrament of Matrimony, to the best of my ability:
So I grow weary of ill-measured garrulity, of loose talk and neglectful stances that leave the Church’s abundantly clear teaching, so necessary for the salvation of the world, so healing to those who hear it with understanding, in a state of confusion. That intimidates those who are trying to make things plain, making them choose between seeming to oppose the current expression of Magisterial authority and actually opposing the Magisterium itself. It is necessary to pretend that it is easy to choose between ephemeral words and the durable Truth; but the simple reality is that, faced with people we are trying to embrace with both arms while speaking healing truth, it is a constant struggle not to speak easy lies that make them easy to hold–affable lies, nice-sounding lies, guaranteed to make their wounds rot and suppurate, rather than healing them!
I grow weary, very weary indeed, sometimes.
Joy comes in the morning, but weeping does endure for the night. They do come in rejoicing with their sheaves, but they went forth with weeping. However much the misguided press strategies common in my own tradition may seem to mandate a habit of grinning like a jackanapes, the simple truth is that Jesus Christ and his Apostles and the prophets before them knew joy as a present hope of a future reality that granted them a strong reason and desire to continue in their suffering service, not as a complacent cheer or constant projection of smiling unctuosity!
So I admit that I have moved from “avoid the hype” to actively minimizing the use of the ubiquitous press photography and quotations of Pope Francis, and that I have reluctantly moved from the “he’s crazy like a fox” through “I admit I sometimes wish he’d be more careful” and to the “a really humble leader would actually listen to good advice” camp. I wrestle with whatever pride, whatever unwillingness to humbly listen, whatever lack of willingness to heed the Spirit’s guidance into blind spots in our faith and practice, even whatever resentment that I must constantly be faced with unprovoked occasions to struggle with these things may be cutting me off from understanding. And it is a struggle I am only confident I am “winning” as I continue to struggle at each fresh occasion.
I say all that because, in the interests of continuing to struggle against any too-quick judgment, any rash frustration, I have tried to carefully watch the interpretation of the latest round of “loose lips sink ships.”
And so I’m going to try to keep myself and those who care about truth alert to possibilities we may have overlooked, starting with a bit of the analysis of recent posts by two people whose abilities I keenly respect. One of these does not directly involve any of the most recent round of high-profile sloppy language; the other does.
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf’s “take” on any given issue may sometimes seem overstated, and his love for the Traditional Latin Mass sometimes leads him into what I hear as passionate excess, but he is careful with the Church’s language and serious about understanding her teachings and history. He speaks to a case in which a woman, living in a marriage, wants to be received into the Church and Confirmed through the RCIA; her husband has been divorced, but has not sought the Church’s judgment about the possibility that his first marriage was null:
In this case, because the non-religious husband is already married to his first wife, the Church starts with the presumption that that first marriage is valid. When he and his first wife said, “I do, until death do us part,” we presume they meant it. Since he is already married, he cannot enter into a subsequent marriage. Civil divorce has no power to overturn a valid marriage.
For him to be married validly to the next door neighbor woman in the query, the Church would have to determine that his first marriage was somehow invalid. Only if that can be established and the presumption of validity overturned could this second marriage been considered a valid one.
Were the next door neighbor in this case to be baptized and confirmed, she could not be admitted to Holy Communion. She is currently living in an irregular marriage, which is an objective state of sin. We don’t welcome people into the Church halfway. Her marriage situation will have to be rectified before she could be admitted, wholly and entirely, into the Church.
(source: ASK FATHER)
As someone who tries really hard to get these things right, and trusts my pastor to help me stick to what the books say, and who agrees with all the premises here, I wonder if Fr. Z is not missing a possibility, here. It seems to me that this woman can be admitted to the RCIA, understanding that it can take indefinitely long for someone to move from Acceptance to Election; and understanding that the teaching necessary to help rectify such situations should be offered precisely within the RCIA. I grant that delay may be advisable, and certainly is a pastoral call to be made with more dense familiarity with the people and circumstances than we can have, but it seems obvious to me that entry to the RCIA is not the proper place to expect fully formed dispositions proper to completion of the Rite.
And, further, I wonder whether this analysis does not neglect the possibility for this woman and man to agree that they will live in a non-sexual domestic relationship which they acknowledge is not properly marriage, while it is necessary for the good of children that they do so; and that they be engaged together in preparation, including her RCIA process and ongoing catechesis and counselling, for their need to eventually separate or regularize their situation.
I own that there are moral hazards, and hazards of scandal, here–but hazards that can be avoided do not seem to me to be the same as objectively sinful states. If someone were to say that she should be admitted to the RCIA and to be taught that the only final options are to regularize the marriage or separate, but that in cases of necessity a non-sexual domestic relationship which is acknowledged not to be proper marriage is a tolerable temporary state, then I am not able to see what the fatal flaw in such an approach would be. Sure, it involves a hazard of scandal two ways–that they will continue to hold themselves forth as married, or that by advertising their lack of proper marriage they will seek to normalize their unusual and merely tolerated domestic arrangement–but I’m not sure why this not-at-all-ideal ground is not real ground one could take a few steps on while moving to something better.
Tell me what I’ve missed, if I’ve missed something? I’ve tried to listen very carefully on the subject.
And then the very excellent canon lawyer Ed Peters, who has helped me get my thinking straight on more than a few specifics, poses the following difficulty in the wake of another weekend of fallout from meandering comments:
About the death penalty. Pope Francis says: “The commandment ‘Thou shall not kill’ has absolute value and concerns both the innocent and the guilty [and even criminals] maintain the inviolable right to life, the gift of God.” The Catechism (2267) says: “the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty”.
It seems to me either (1) the CCC is wrong, and Church tradition does NOT allow the death penalty; (2) Church tradition is wrong, and it SHOULD have always excluded the death penalty; or (3) Pope Francis is wrong and the death penalty is not an ‘absolutely’ forbidden.
Or am I mistaken?
(source: Canon Law)
Now, insofar as “absolutely” should be used far more cautiously than this, I don’t think there’s any way out of the verbal problem here without simply taking that particular word as a mere intensifier, used imprecisely.
Having granted that we are stretching more than we should have to, though, I think it is possible to make sense of this utterance without reaching an impossible conclusion.
Even the criminal justly convicted of a capital crime is a human creature, with the dignity of such a creature. That dignity may be obscured by evil acts, or insulted by unjust and inhuman treatment, but it is never actually effaced. A prisoner, or a prison guard, or Jack Ruby, or an aggrieved member of a victim’s family, is not justified in killing the prisoner. Commission of a capital crime costs the prisoner the moral right to accuse the regime that executes him (upon a just conviction) of injustice against him, the same right the prisoner loses at law when the conviction is entered. Even then, both morality and law (i.e., the natural law and any human law that justly implements it) call for the possibility of recourse against what our Constitution calls “cruel and unusual punishment,” and even being liable to execution for a capital crime does not cost the criminal those rights. But that by itself wouldn’t justify any argument against the regime’s own imposition of sentence, would it?
Or would it, if the regime’s methods were “cruel” either by sadism or by negligence? Or if the regime’s implementation of execution is so tied to political gestures, so inconsistently applied, as to be perpetually “unusual” and incapable of fulfilling public justice? Or if the regime’s credibility on life-and-death matters of public justice were critically undermined by, for example, its treatment of the slaughter of innocents as a “human right”?
Have I badly missed anything in this analysis?
I don’t say it isn’t tiresome, wearying, frustrating, and morally hazardous for us all to have to deal with so much sloppy speech from the very occupant of the Chair of Peter; but I do think it may be possible for us to continue to reflect on what may be true and useful even in these troubling speeches. It may be necessary to chew hard, and thank God for the bread all the same.