Hypocritical scholars criticize Amore Laetitia and Pope Francis: Jesus and the Pharisees

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites."

I have perused several scholarly critiques of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation about marriage and divorce.  Frankly, most of what I read comes across to me as pharisaical.  

Some old dudes in Brazil, who call themselves the Plinio Correa de Oliveira Institute,  published a turgid document (95 footnotes) claiming that Pope Francis' papal exhortation "Opens the Gates of the Church and Society for a Programmed Demolition of Marriage and the Family." Managing to be both hysterical and utterly boring at the same time, the document compares Pope Francis' pedagogical model to Jean Jacques Rousseau (!) and calls on the Pope to revoke Amoris Laetitia outright.

Father Regis Scanlon, writing in Crisis Magazine, says the document "has many Catholics thinking they are living in a nightmare." Father Scanlon asks his readers to reflect on a seventh-century doctrinal controversy during the papal reign of Honorius I, which he thinks might  help Catholics weather the Amoris controversy. 

Honorius, it seems, got too cozy with the Monothelitists; and he got a theological slap on the wrist by his successor, Leo II. Honorius, Leo charged, "did not illumine this Apostolic Church with the doctrine of the Apostolic tradition, but allowed it, while immaculate, to be stained by profane betrayal."

Thanks, Father Scanlon, for sharing that story with us. I'll bet you give great homilies!

Then there's Richard A. Spinello, a research professor at Boston College, who laments the fact that the church hierarchy is unwilling to speak out against Pope Francis's blow to "doctrinal integrity." Spinello ends his essay in Crisis Magazine by saying it is up to the laity "who must face reality and speak with candor about the deficiencies of this alien papal teaching." 

Let me get this straight, Professor Spinello. Are you saying it's Joe Six-Pack's job to tell Pope Francis what to do?  Good luck with that!

In another Crisis essay, Spinello sums up his view of Amoris Laetitia by saying: "At best, this is an imprecise work that needs clarification; at worst, it is a subtle repudiation of Veritatis Splendor and two thousand years of Catholic moral Tradition." 

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

God knows I am no theologian, but I was raised a Methodist so I can read the Bible. And this is what Jesus said in the Book of Matthew:

Woe to you, scribes and pharisees, you hypocrites. You lock the kingdom of heaven before human beings. You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.

Woe to you, scribes and pharisees, you hypocrites. You traverse sea and land to make one convert, but when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna twice as much as yourselves.

As I said, I am no theologian, but that passage reassures me that Pope Francis was on the right track when he wrote Amoris Laetitia. It is, after all, a message of love and mercy.

 But then what do I know? I'm just a back-pew lay Catholic who lives in Louisiana, and I know absolutely nothing about Honorius I and those wretched Monothelites.

References

Plinio Correa de Oliveira Institute. 'Amoris Laetitia' Opens the Gates of thke Church and Society for a Programmed Demolition of Marriage and the Family, September 29, 2016.

Fr. Regis Scanlon, O.F.M. CAP. What History May Tell Us About Amoris Laetitia. Crisis Magazine, January 26, 2017.

Richard A. Spinello. Debate Continues Over Amoris Laetitia. Crisis Magazine, May 25, 2017.

Richard A. Spinello. On Rocco Buttiglione's Defense of Amoris Laetitia. Crisis Magazine, August 9, 2016.

Divorced Catholics are the illegal aliens of the Catholic Church. Perhaps they will all go to hell along with the priests who denied them communion.

I lived in Houston for six years--a lovely city. During my time there I got to know several undocumented immigrants--or to use a less politically correct term--illegal aliens. Every illegal immigrant I knew was a hard-working, law abiding individual. Several were practicing Catholics and some had families.

But an undocumented immigrant's life is different from the life of a citizen. A traffic stop, a minor misunderstanding, an encounter with an unsympathetic police officer--any small incident can turn an illegal immigrant's life upside down and trigger the process of deportation.

If you want to visualize just how tenuous an undocumented immigrant's life is, watch The Visitor, a terrific movie starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, and Danai Gurira.  Sleiman plays Tarek, an undocumented Syrian living in New York City. One minute everything is fine and then Tarek is wrongly accused of jumping a turnstile in a New York subway station. Two plainclothes police officers arrest him, and he is whisked away to a detention center. Eventually he is deported back to Syria.

Although I wouldn't press the point too strongly, divorced Catholics are the undocumented aliens of the Catholic Church. According to Catholic doctrine, divorced people may not receive the sacraments of the Church unless they live a celibate life.

Divorced Catholics who wish to remarry or divorced persons who wish to become Catholics must have their marriage annulled by a diocesan tribunal, an expensive, time-consuming and humiliating process. Unless they are able to prove their prior marriage was not a true marriage at all, their annulment application will be denied.

The annulment process is truly bizarre, a throwback, one might say, to the Spanish Inquisition. I am told a majority of annulment applications are denied, but I have heard stories about people getting an annulment simply by writing a large check to the Catholic Church. And I know it is possible to get a marriage annulled even if there are children from the union.  One woman I know got an annulment of her marriage even though she and her husband had been married more than 15 years and had four children together.

Most Catholic skip the annulment process altogether and continue to receive the sacraments--or at least the Sacrament of Communion. Sympathetic priests sometimes counsel there is a "local solution" to divorce and that Catholics can receive communion if they make a good confession. Other priests say this is nonsense; and no bishop, as far as I know, endorses the idea of a local solution.

Thus, divorced Catholics reside in the Catholic community like undocumented immigrants. Year after year, they attend Mass, make financial contributions, and volunteer in Catholic works of charity.  Just as undocumented immigrants begin to feel like American citizens, divorced Catholics begin to feel they are Catholics in good standing. Indeed, sympathetic parish churches might be described as"sanctuary cities" for divorced Catholics.

But then one day, a priest of the old school finds them out and tells them they are forbidden to receive communion or go to confession unless they obtain an annulment.  Much like Tarek in The Visitor, they are whisked into  spiritual detention; and for all practical purposes, they are kicked out of the Church.

It would be pleasant to believe that the priests who condemn divorced Catholics are the Church's best priests;  but in fact, they are the worst.  The priest who denied me the sacraments was one of the priests who tried to cover up child rape by a fellow priest years ago.

I know many divorced Catholics who have left the Catholic Church because of the Church's harsh official stance on divorce. They come to realize that for many priests and bishops, the thief on the cross, the woman at the well, the adulteress Jesus forgave--all those Bible stories are simply tales for the nursery.

In fact, in the minds of many Catholic priests and prelates, the Catholic Church is not the Bride of Christ. Rather, it is an exclusive civic organization, much like the old whites-only country clubs where only the "best people" were allowed to play golf.

Pope Francis would like to bring divorced Catholics back into the Community of Faith, but even Pope Francis, a truly holy man, cannot overcome the mean-spiritedness of a large segment of the Catholic clergy,

Monsignor Richard Mouton was the spiritual cop who tried to deport me from the Catholic faith. I imagine he believes I will burn in hell for going to communion more than a thousand times before I got picked up in a random traffic stop in a communion booth.

And perhaps Monsignor Mouton is right. If so, the most frightening aspect of this prospect is the sure certainty that I will share a cell in Hades with Monsignor Mouton himself.

The Visitor

My humble apology to people who call themselves "recovering Catholics"

A couple of years ago I wrote an arrogant blog essay entitled "Don't insult me by calling yourself a recovering Catholic." I deeply regret this essay, but I am going to leave it on the web as a penance and a reminder to myself to be more humble.

In my essay, I took umbrage at people who describe themselves as recovering Catholics.  Such people, I said, are insinuating that Catholicism is a disease like alcoholism, drug addiction or a personality disorder. I quoted G. K. Chesterton, who said most people don't leave Catholicism because they reject Catholic doctrine; they leave "to have a high old time."

I apologize to lapsed Catholics for that essay; and I apologize to the late Mr. Chesterton for using his words to buttress my argument. I realize now that millions of Catholics have left the faith because the priests they encountered don't really want them.

My nephew, for example, is a Catholic; but he married a Protestant; and his wedding took place in a Methodist Church.  Recently, a Catholic friend asked him to be the godfather for his friend's child. But a Catholic priest refused to allow it. Why? Because my nephew was not married in a Catholic Church.

How much longer do you think my nephew will remain Catholic?

I myself had a nasty experience with Monsignor Richard Mouton in the Lafayette Diocese, which I've already described. I haven't been to Mass for months. Maybe I myself am a recovering Catholic.

Does the Catholic Church give a damn about the people it turns away because they are divorced or married outside the Church? No, I don't think so.

Pope Francis is a saintly man, and if all priests and bishops had just a small fraction of his kindly qualities, the Church would be fine. But the Church is losing members by the millions; so many American Catholics have left the faith that the nation's second largest religious group is made up of lapsed Catholics.

But the priests don't care. There are plenty of Catholic rubes coming to the United States from Latin America and Asia--enough to pay the utility bills for a few more years.

Nevertheless, I think the hardhearted clergy underestimate how much damage they are doing by refusing to extend a hand of mercy to people who are divorced or who married outside the Church.

Take my own case as an example. Many of my friends and family members are lapsed Catholics or indifferent Catholics, but they respect me for sticking with it. Now they see I may not be sticking with it.  And my lapse makes it less likely that dozens of friends and family members will ever return to the fold.

But perhaps I am being too hard on our rude and judgmental priests. After all, they are evangelists in their own way. They are doing their part to build up the nation's second largest religious denomination.

Divorced Catholics in the Jubilee Year of Mercy: No Mercy for Catholic Survivors of Broken Marriages

I came across this lovely quote from Pope Francis last September while visiting the Shrine of St. Rita of Cascia in Italy.  Appearing on a large poster were these words:

In the Sacrament of Reconciliation, God forgives sins, which are really removed; yet there remains the negative imprint that sins have left in our behavior and in our thoughts. 

The Mercy of God, however, is even stronger than this! It becomes indulgence on the part of the Father, who, through the Bride of Christ, his Church, reaches pardoned sinners and frees them from every residue left by the consequences of sin, enabling them to act with charity, to grow in love rather than to fall back into sin.

Did Pope Francis intend for these powerfully reassuring words to apply to divorced Catholics? To divorced people who wish to become Catholic?

I believe he did. As the Pope said in Amoris Laetitia, his recent Apostolic Exhortation, "No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!"

As Pope Francis pointed out in Amoris Laetitia, the Synod Fathers have reached a general consensus with regard to people living in irregular situations, which he quoted:

In considering a pastoral approach towards people who have contracted a civil marriage, who are divorced and remarried, or simply living together, the Church has the responsibility of helping them understand the divine pedagogy of grace in their lives and offering them assistance so they can reach the fullness of God's plan for them.

This was possible, Pope Francis added "by the power of the Holy Spirit."

Of utmost importance to divorced Catholics, Pope Francis wrote that divorced and remarried Catholics "need to be fully integrated into Christian communities in the variety of ways possible, while avoiding any occasion of scandal." Indeed, Pope Francis emphasized:

Such persons need to feel not as excommunicated members of the Church, but instead as living members, able to live and grow in the Church and experience her as a mother who welcomes them always, who takes care of them with affection and encourages them along the path of life and the Gospel. This integration is also needed in the care and Christian upbringing of their children, who ought to be considered most important.

Tragically, these powerful and holy words, written by Pope Francis during the Jubilee Year of Mercy, have been explicitly rejected by many Catholic priests and bishops.

How ironic. The Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal--this catastrophic episode in the life of the American Church--is a stain on the Bride of Christ that may never be wiped away. Certainly, the priests and bishops who participated in this scandal or who covered it up are in urgent need of mercy.

And yet so many of our priests and bishops offer no mercy whatsoever to divorced Catholics, even in this, the Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Msgr. Richard Mouton, Lafayette Diocese

References

Pope Francis. Amoris Laetitia--The Joy of Love. (2016)