VATICAN CITY
The Week
Michael Brendan Dougherty
To a universal fanfare from the mainstream and Catholic media, Pope Francis has issued a long-awaited document, Amoris Laetitia, “the Joy of Love,” as his conclusion to the Catholic Church’s two-year Synod on the Family. But to this Catholic, the pope’s supposedly reformist document is a botch job.
For two years, bishops presented their respective cases for two contradicting views of marriage, re-marriage, and the Church’s own sacraments. Pope Francis didn’t choose between these two options. He chose them both. The pope did not effect some grand synthesis. He merely gave his imprimatur to the Church’s own confused practice on these matters and, more frighteningly, to its self-doubt.
As a result, the Joy of Love reads as an admission that God, as Catholics understand him, really isn’t merciful or gracious to poor sinners. So priests should try to do better from now on.
All of this requires some explanation. While the document spends hundreds of pages, some of them quite good, and others quite banal, on the meaning of Christian marriage and family life, the headlines and anxiety all revolve around one topic. The “Great Matter” of the two-year Synod on the Family came down to one question: Can the divorced and re-married receive holy communion without obtaining an annulment or otherwise amending their life?
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