Amoris Laetitia – Time For Us To Grow Up!

What is striking, and refreshing, about Pope Francis’ new document Amoris Laetitia is not its originality — there is no dramatic change in Church teaching on the family here —but the hopeful way in which he invites the whole Church to dialogue.

Dialogue and communication is both explicit and implicit in the way in which he takes us through the extensive exposition of marriage and family life as a process—from love, through engagement and the liturgical celebration, and the continuing process that is the sacrament of marriage.

Similarly, he guides the way seminarians and priests are called to study and understand the sacrament, to accompany married couples and those preparing for marriage.

Dialogue and communication pervade the parts about parenting and the education of youth about marriage and family life. And above all it is essential to accompanying people whose marriages are troubled or have failed.

One may sense too that Pope Francis is shifting the way we think about marriage and family from a classical and deductive paradigm to one that is historical and inductive.

To explain: a paradigm is a way we think and act on something, a broad guiding principle. The classical and deductive paradigm starts from overarching theological ideas that seem unchanged and unchangeable, often expressed as laws that are then applied to specific cases — in effect forcing the specific cases into the pre-existing idea.

The historical and inductive approach starts with the specifics, lived reality itself, and then draws upon principles, theology and law to interpret and challenge that reality.

The Amoris Laetitia exhortation is precisely this: looking at family in all its complexity and applying theology to it to see how lived reality might better grow into the universal values we embrace.

Drawing on St Thomas Aquinas, the pope asks us all to focus on the particular so that our theology may actually help real families deepen in faith, hope and love as they strive to grow into a greater identification with what our theology proclaims.

The pope’s approach is subtle on the questions of divorce, annulment, remarriage and the question of Communion to those in what often is called irregular unions. He reaffirms strongly the need to implement the shorter, streamlined and cheaper annulment process he introduced last year, including in some cases the right of the bishop to personally annul cases where grounds for annulment are clearcut.

Arguing strongly for a more case-by-case approach, he also turns more firmly to the internal forum of prayerful dialogue between priest and persons in a complex marital situation to resolve the question of Communion.

Here he advocates prudent discernment among the parties — reflection rooted in prayer on the circumstances they find themselves in, seeking the good God desires. Fundamental to this process is conscience, formed and informed by Catholic teaching and the specific context.

Above all, Francis reminds us that mercy fulfils justice, that love transcends and is the purpose of law.

Such an approach may be unsettling to some.  Some may find this insufficiently clear and decisive, a kind of wishy-washy ethics.

However, we are sinners. We are redeemed sinners, who strive and fail and strive again to live up to the demands of the Gospel.

Christ welcomes this striving; indeed, the gospels are full of his scathing remarks about the rigorous and proud who look down on those striving sinners with whom Jesus associated.

His call to us is to keep striving for the good, recommitting ourselves to the “prize” when we fall short. This was the vision of Aquinas too, and it is the vision of Pope Francis. We are a Church of the imperfect, not the perfect.

Of greater concern is whether the Church can put into practice what Pope Francis calls us to do.

There is a nasty undercurrent of condemnation and exclusion. By condemning others we fool ourselves that we are perfect. Genuine dialogue between laity and clergy is often replaced with relations of power. This is sick, the worst kind of pharisaic behaviour.

Pope Francis is calling us to grow up as Christians. May we all respond generously to his challenge and the challenge of the Gospel.