…cont’d from above:
I can appreciate that a canon lawyer would be inclined to look at whether a issue is in agreement with the Law, or in disagreement. But I think it’s important to remember that the Law serves mankind, not the other way around. In the non-religious legal sphere, it is clear that there are situations where application of the law can be suspended in certain cases where mercy or need dictates it, without doing injury to the law itself. For example, in the aviation sphere, the FAA imposes a 250 knot speed limit below 10,000 feet. However a fully-laden 747 taking off for an intercontinental flight cannot maintain enough lift to climb out at 250 knots, and must climb out at around 300 knots. Clearly the law is not applied in this case. It does not detract from the safety intent of slowing traffic down below 10,000 ft to account for slow-moving VFR (visual flight rules) traffic that needs time to see and be seen. The same principle may apply for instance, to someone who panics and breaks the speed limit on the way to the hospital if his pregnant wife enters labour in the car. A police car (around here at least) stopping the driver for speeding will quickly assess the situation and provide a high-speed escort to the hospital, and won’t charge the driver. A friend got off a ticket for failing to stop at a stop sign when he proved that the weather conditions, and the lack of salting of the road, caused him to slide through the intersection due to ice hidden beneath snow.
It should be clear from this papacy that Francis is no legal absolutist and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Amoris Laetitia does not promote legal absolutism.
It should also be clear from reading AL that Francis is
not proposing that we allow all D&R to receive the sacraments (plural). But by the same token he is also saying that there are some cases where mercy dictates that in exceptional circumstances should allow the person to receive the sacraments. He uses existing criteria in the CCC to defend that position:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly mentions these factors: “imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance,inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors”.343 In another paragraph, the Catechism refers once again to circumstances which mitigate moral responsibility, and mentions at length “affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability”.344
How anyone can read AL in the context of the Holy Father’s other documents and pronouncements, and claim it is just business as usual with some sugar coating, is beyond me. It is either naivety, wishful thinking, or projection.
Similarly some on the left, and the secular media, are doing the same thing by thinking that AL opens the door wide open. I urge folks to read AL not from a “conservative” or “liberal” or “traditionalist” lens, all of which have no meaning in Catholicism, but as orthodox faithful, and at face value. Taken that way it is clear that some limited change is intended, that Pope Francis is not a legal absolutist, and that he believes that pastoral discernment in these rare and specific cases do not do injustice to the law, they instead make the law just. And also that he puts the responsibility for discernment directly into the hands of the pastors that counsel the faithful on the front lines, not in the hands of jurists in Rome.
