Various Catholic Feeds

There is, I fear, no end in sight of the nonsensical nonsense being unleashed in the wake of various high-level ecclesiastic dalliances with doctrinal ambiguity and disciplinary confusion in regard to holy Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics. Call it Life in this Valley of Tears. Anyway, Pope Francis is going to do about this whatever he is going to about it and the Church will respond to whatever he does in due course. For now, I simply write to urge caution about some proposals to facilitate irregular reception of the Sacrament in these cases even if such proposals are couched in apparently sophisticated scholarly terms.

For example, an Australian theologian has proposed a rescript to be issued by a bishop in accord with norms supposedly to be devised by Pope Francis, granting permission for divorced-and-remarried Catholics to take holy Communion. The proposal includes impressive vocabulary such as “juridical” and “administrative” and “canons”; it sports footnotes to “assessors” and “salus animarum” and warns about “anomalies”; it underscores Church teaching on the permanence of marriage and assures readers that it offers no doctrinal or canonical changes to this teaching.

Balderdash. Pure, unadulterated, balderdash. This proposed rescript is really a license to sin.

More specifically, this rescript would (purport to) grant permission to ignore one sin (adultery) and to commit another (sacrilegious reception of holy Communion). It even manages to suggest a third sin (attempting sacramental Confession without firm purpose of amendment)! Couched in mellifluous pastoral, sacramental, and canonical language, to be issued on arch/diocesan letterhead, such a letter, expressly invoking Our Lord’s teaching on marriage and to be signed by a Successor of the Apostles in the name of Christ, who—I kid you not—congratulates the couple on their perseverance in allowing the Church to grant them this favor(!), would constitute, I suggest, a blasphemy (CCC 2148).

As I and many others have said from the outset of this mess, holy Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics—except for those committed to living as brother-and-sister, and besides some (vanishingly rare, if correctly understood) ‘internal forum’ cases—cannot legitimately be approved unless marriage is not what Jesus plainly said it was, and/or adultery is not what Jesus plainly said it was, and/or the Eucharist is not what Jesus plainly said it was. Every attempt I’ve seen so far to prove otherwise rests on doctrinal and disciplinary interpretations so tortured they would make a Pharisee blush.

If it matters, the article published in support of this proposed rescript is also a hodge-podge of amateur’s errors, including: claiming that mental instability (whatever exactly that is) is a “diriment impediment” to marriage; misreading Mitis to authorize its shorter process only in documentary cases; not realizing that “administrative” acts ARE “juridical” acts; dragging Canon 59 into a discussion of “privileges of the faith” cases; and so on. While some sentences are just funny (“Such administrative acts may address canonically irregular and practically messy situations in respect of which a moderated pastoral response is prudent”) others, such as the paragraph beginning “Such undesirable prospects…” are, well, I don’t know what they are, except that most can mean a fantastically large number of things, and I don’t feel like guessing which points might be uppermost in the author’s mind. But it doesn’t really matter.

The bottom line remains the bottom line: anyone who claims that holy Communion may be approved for divorced-and-remarried Catholics without repudiating one of the three fundamental assertions above simply does not know, or care, what he is talking about. I do not know how many ways there are left to re-state this point. Personally, I’ve about run out.

Still, there is, I suppose, one way to secure holy Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics without attacking any of the fundamental assertions upon which the current prohibitory discipline rests: Simply refuse to defend the doctrine or, less obviously, just decline to enforce the discipline. Don’t change anything; just, you know, ignore certain things, like, say, Canons 915, 916, and 987 in light of, say, Canons 1055 and 1085.

That approach is greatly to be feared.

Dr. Edward Feser’s recent post on papal infallibility will be required reading next time I take students through Book III of the Code, especially Canons 749-750. But in any post of 6,328 words dealing with papal infallibility (and, I might add, only with papal infallibility, that is, not with, say, collegial or ecclesial infallibility, but just papal infallibility), it should not be surprising if I find a few words with which to disagree. If Feser disagrees with Cdl. Dulles in regard to a technical point (as Feser does once, correctly in my view), then I may demur from Feser’s phrasing in one respect, too.

Feser writes in regard to John Paul II’s ap. lit. Ordinatio sacerdotalis (1994) that “The reason [Ordinatio] is to be regarded as infallible is not that the papal document in question constituted an exercise of the extraordinary Magisterium, but rather because of the teaching’s status as part of the constant and universal doctrine of the Church.”

Hmmm. Of course documents aren’t infallible, acts are infallible (under certain circumstances, etc., etc.). But infallible acts can be, and usually are, performed through documents. Ordinatio is, I suggest, an example of extraordinary, papal infallibility being exercised through a document.

St. John Paul II wrote in Ordinatio: “Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

Now, if that language—language acknowledging that the assertion in question is already knowable by the ordinary infallible magisterium but is still in evident need of authoritative reiteration, language that states the matter in question to be doctrinal (specifically, ecclesiological) in nature, language that quotes Vatican II’s explanation of papal infallibility (Lumen gentium 25) and quotes the same foundational passage from Luke, language that asserts the ‘definitive’ (not prudential, not advisory) character of the assertion, and language that refers to the assertion as needing to be ‘held’ (as a secondary object of infallibility), not ‘believed” (as if it were a primary object),—if, I say, the language used by the pope in Ordinatio does not represent an infallible act papal magisterium, then one will never know what language does qualify as connoting such infallibility, not, that is, short of setting up ‘magic word’ criteria for infallibility precisely of the sort repeatedly rejected by all teachings on infallibility.

Yes, I know that then-Cdl. Ratzinger said he did not regard Ordinatio as infallible and there is language from John Paul II suggesting the same thing. What can I say? Ordinatio is infallible, Ratzinger was not; John Paul’s infallible teaching authority was engaged when he issued Ordinatio, not when he briefly commented on it.

As this post is, as mentioned above, simply a demurral from—and not a refutation of—Feser’s brief comment on Ordinatio, and is made mostly to preserve the argument for another day, I’ll not defend my views further, except to quote from a respected scholar of infallibility, Rev. James O’Connor, who, in discussing Ordinatio, said this: “It is clear that here the pope meets all the requirements set forth by Vatican I and explained by Gasser for an infallible papal definition. … Some have thought that the papal teaching in Ordinatio [s]acerdotalis was not itself infallible, but a ‘witness’ to the infallible teaching of the ordinary, universal Magisterium. Such was the personal theological opinion of Cardinal Ratzinger … However, the teaching of Ordinatio [s]acerdotalis is probably best viewed in light of what has been said above.” J. O’Connor, The Gift of Infallibility (Ignatius, 2008) 115-116.

Now, back to Feser.