Comments on Amoris laetitia (1)

First reflections after the press conference on Pope Francis’s exhortation ‘Amoris laetitia’ (8 Aprile 2016)

My first impression, after the presentation of the Pope’s exhortation, is this: the Church has found itself in the blind alley made by its own rigorism and legalism, and does not know how to come out of it, to move forward.

Cardinal Schönborn was pharisaically fanciful in wanting to explain “the development, not the change in doctrines”, resorting to false and misleading interpretations, in contradiction with the facts. Francis, despite the intended confusion created by the overlong text, has in effect opened the door, for divorced and remarried persons, to the primacy of conscience, which in the post-conciliar Church was destroyed by the Vatican’s skillful, legalistic strictness. Now Schönborn explained that Ratzinger with his CDF, and also Pope John Paul II, had already expected that those who were convinced in conscience of the non-existence of their first marriage might be admitted to communion. What a crude falsehood! When everyone knows that the doctrine of an absolute prohibition of communion to divorced and remarried persons was the Church’s absolutist and strict response to the proposal, made by three German bishops including Kasper and Lehmann, who had recommended such admission. The Church’s response was an absolute and clearly established NO forever. Now Schönborn says that it is necessary to read properly those documents of the past, where that NO was not an absolute NO. He added that the text of Familiaris consortio already made the distinction and implicitly permitted to think of communion for those who believed in conscience that their marriage was null. What pharisaical falsehood!

But let us suppose that this falsehood is true. Let us suppose that what is now seemingly made more explicit in Francis’s exhortation, was implicitly allowed before. If this is true, why has the Church not thought to make a clear apology to those persons who, unlike the false pharisees, were not so able to understand the implicit permission, and who have suffered all these years and have borne the insults of clergy who made no exception in the case of divorced and remarried persons (for example, they publicly humiliated the divorced parents of children on the day of their first communion, by refusing communion to the children’s fathers). And now they discover that there never was so absolutist a reason to justify the imposition of these conflicts of conscience and sufferings, because their case may have been “implied” as an exception to a hard and inhuman explicit rule. How many theologians, priests and faithful have suffered for this inhuman rigidity, and now the Church with the smiling mouth of Schönborn tells us tranquilly: “but it was all implicit” and it was only that the ignorant people did not know how to read properly the words which we crafty ones had made implicit. What a brood of twisted pharisees! The same is said in the words of the exhortation: the pope admits that perhaps we have been a bit too rigid in presenting our doctrines (see paragraph 36)! Neither the Church nor Pope Francis have thought that perhaps they should ask pardon for the effects that these inadequate doctrinal presentations have had on the faithful, or to begin in earnest to repair the damage that has been caused. What a type of pharisaical texts!

Cardinal Schönborn’s funniest response was made to a journalist who said that he had been shocked by the fact that the chapter on sexuality made no reference to the Synod. From this, we see that the Fathers had nothing to say on this fundamental theme for marital relations. Schönborn admits that it was so, and then he begins to lose himself, asking aloud if there was a married synodal Father, but then remembers that there was none. Then he concludes: the majority of the Fathers; no, all the Fathers were celibate. Full stop. This is the message which is intended to justify their mental gaps with regard to sexuality. It is as if a person who should not have had sexual acts (as the Church presupposes) has no need to maintain a mature conscience and an up-to-date knowledge with regard to something as fundamental as sexuality and its maturation at the personal level, even though that person intends to express himself on human behaviour in an authoritative way.

A pity that the great theologian Cardinal Schönborn does not realise that, in this way, he expressly admits the Church’s insidious vision of sexuality, reduced as it is to sexual acts and activity, without looking at our human personality regardless of actions taken or not. He admits that the celibates (presumably non-practioners in the field of sexuality) have nothing to say on sexuality - or, at least, that they do not see the importance of saying anything about it in a meeting which was dedicated to marriage. He seems unaware that even those who have not experienced the beauty of sexual acts should still develop in themselves their own sexuality and know how to speak of it, without complexes or taboos, and to speak of it as fundamental component of the human personality. But this will not be, in the Church. He could not have expressed better, than by his uncomfortable response, the Church’s ignorance and gaps in knowledge about sexuality. But he added with satisfaction that the Pope had remedied the ignorance, as if he too wasn’t celibate or at least had been able to get round this detail of his life, and had written a whole chapter on sexuality that is exclusively heterosexual.

If, therefore, those ill-equipped Fathers are not exactly experts in heterosexual human sexuality, even less will they be experts in homosexual human sexuality, as the text itself reveals. In fact, in the exhortation’s text, the Pope has not remedied any of the Fathers’ ignorance, instead he has simply repeated their position (see paragraphs 250-251) and in this way he has confirmed the Church’s homophobia, ignorant as it is of modern human sciences. Given this, perhaps it would have been better not to have lost all these synodal years for results that are so bad, so ambiguous. Here is the sadness of Catholic love.

In a few decades of years they will make a new text, and they will say that in 2016 they were too rigid in understanding equal marriage, which in effect does include homosexual persons, and they will say that in the meantime they have developed explicitly that which was already implicit in the long-ago 2016. In reality, these ignorant people speak today in the Pope’s text - with an insistence that belongs to the sexually obsessed - about persons with “homosexual tendencies” (paragraph 250). Indeed, if in the case of homosexual persons we are dealing with “pathological and abnormal tendencies”, compared to the healthy state of mind and the healthy human personality, and mostly “fleeting tendencies or at least correctable”, then one may actually accept all of the subsequent Catholic teaching against homosexuals: the pathology must not be promoted, and may be banned to protect others. However, if it is the case (as is now evident in scientific and experiential knowledge) that we are not dealing with “pathological and correctable tendencies”, but with a healthy and natural sexual orientation, then the whole Catholic doctrine must change in this regard, with consequent correction of the interpretation of related Biblical passages, which in effect do not condemn healthy sexual orientation but condemn only certain sexual behaviours, which the Bible could not understand in its day.

The Church is capable - in ten, twenty or thirty years - of putting another Schönborn into a press conference, who will explain: “in effect, we previously condemned those with “homosexual tendencies” but not healthy people with a sexual orientation that was not heterosexual. And already in 2016, and even before, it was “implicit” that, if the science on sexual orientation was true, what we said about persons with “homosexual tendencies” was not true, or at least true only for those with the “tendency” and not for those persons with a healthy sexual orientation that was not heterosexual. Only that we stupid readers in 2016 did not know how to read those hidden implications. What to say about a Church that has produced a text of this sort? What to say about this brood of loquacious pharisees?

Pope Francis allows himself to say that the Church has studied the reality, but this is simply not true. The Church has not consulted any human science, except for its own jokey homophobia within the walls of the Vatican maintained in sentiments of hatred but concealed for the world public in sugared words. That Church has compared itself only with the synodal Fathers and homophobic experts, incapable of examining objectively, calmly and without prejudices the current state of scientific knowledge. The Church has simply ignored the knowledge of reality, and in this way it has ignored homosexual persons. And so even Pope Francis has failed to live up to his promise: Before building or confirming ideas, confirm the reality (‘Evangelii gaudium’, but who still remembers the promises?). He has shut us in the blind alley of cold, rigid and unverified ideas about non-heterosexual persons, deprived of dignity and not even worthy of serious study, and he has imposed an ideological propaganda of the “joy” of love which is heterosexual only, and which insensitively excludes all others, who should not exist.