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PopeWatch: Anna M. Silvas

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Sandro Magister at his blog at his blog Chiesa brings us the commentary on Amoris Laetitia of Professor Anna M. Silvas, a world renowned authority on the Church Fathers, who teaches at the University of New England and Australian Catholic University.  Her analysis is devastating:

 

And all that was be fore I came to reading chapter eight. I have wondered if the extraordinary prolixity of the first seven chapters was meant to wear us down before we came to this crucial chapter, and catch us off-guard. To me, the entire tenor of chapter eight is problematic, not just n. 304 and footnote 351. As soon as I finished it, I thought to myself: Clear as a bell: Pope Francis wanted some form of the Kasper proposal from the beginning. Here it is. Kasper has won. It all explains Pope Francis’ terse comments at the end of the 2015 Synod, when he censured narrow-minded “pharisees” – evidently those who had frustrated a better outcome according to his agenda. “Pharisees”? The sloppiness of his language! They were the modernists, in a way, of Judaism, the masters of ten thousand nuances – and most pertinently, those who tenaciously upheld the practice of divorce and remarriage. The real analogues of the pharisees in this whole affair are Kasper and his allies.

To press on. The words of n. 295 on St John Paul’s comments on the “law of gradualness” in “Familiaris Consortio” 34, seem to me subtly treacherous and corruptive. For they try to coopt and corrupt John Paul in support precisely of a situational ethics that the holy pope bent all his loving pastoral intelligence and energy to oppose. Let us hear then what St John Paul really says about the law of gradualness:

“Married people… cannot however look on the law as merely an ideal to be achieved in the future: they must consider it as a command of Christ the Lord to overcome difficulties through constancy. And so what is known as ‘the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance cannot be identified with a ‘gradualness of the law’, as if there were differing degrees or forms of precept in God’s law for different individuals and situations. In God’s plan, all husbands and wives are called in marriage to holiness”.

Footnote 329 of “Amoris Laetitia” also presents another surreptitious corruption. It cites a passage of “Gaudium et Spes” 51, concerning the intimacy of married life. But by an undetected sleight of hand it is placed in the mouth of the divorced and remarried instead. Such corruptions surely indicate that references and footnotes, which in this document are made to do some heavy lifting, need to be properly verified.

Already in n. 297, we see the responsibility for “irregular situations” being shifted to the discernment of pastors. Step by subtle step the arguments advance definite agenda. N. 299 queries how “current forms of exclusion currently practiced” can be surmounted, and n. 301 introduces the idea of “conversation with the priest in the internal forum”. Can you not already detect where the argument is going?

So we arrive at n. 301, which drops the guarded manner as we descend into the maelstrom of “mitigating factors”. Here it seems the “mean old Church” has finally been superseded by the “nice new Church”: in the past we may have thought that those living in “irregular situations” without repentance were in a state of mortal sin; now, however, they may not be in a state of mortal sin after all, indeed, sanctifying grace may be at work in them.

It is then explained, in an excess of pure subjectivism, that “a subject may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding its inherent value”. Here is a mitigating factor to beat all mitigating factors. On this argument then, do we now exculpate the original envy of Lucifer, because he had “great difficulty in understanding” the “inherent value” to him, of the transcendent majesty of God? At which point, I feel that we have lost all foothold, and fallen like Alice into a parallel universe, where nothing is quite what it seems to be.

A series of quotations from St Thomas Aquinas are brought to bear, on which I am not qualified to comment, except to say that, obviously, proper verification and contextualization are strongly indicated. N. 304 is a highly technical apologia for moral casuistry, argued in exclusively philosophical terms without a hint of Christ or of faith. One cannot but think that this was supplied by another hand. It is not Francis’ style, even if it is his belief.

Finally we come to the crucial n. 305. It commences with two of the sort of throwaway caricatures that recur throughout the document. The new doctrine that Pope Francis had flagged a little earlier he now repeats and reasserts: a person can be in an objective situation of mortal sin – for that is what he is speaking about – and still be living and growing in God’s grace, all the “while receiving the help of the Church”, which, the infamous footnote 351 declares, can include, “in certain cases”, both confession and holy communion. I am sure that there are by now many busily attempting to “interpret” all this according to a “hermeneutic of continuity”, to show its harmony, I presume, with Tradition. I might add that in this n. 305, Pope Francis quotes himself four times. In fact, it appears that Pope Francis’ most frequently cited reference through “Amoris laetitia” is himself, and that in itself is interesting.

In the rest of the chapter Pope Francis changes tack. He makes an inverted admission that his approach may leave “room for confusion” (n. 308). To this he responds with a discussion of “mercy”. At the very beginning in n. 7 he declared that “everyone should feel challenged by chapter eight”. Yes we do, but not quite in the blithe heuristic sense he meant it. Pope Francis has freely admitted in time past that he is the sort of person who loves to make “messes”? Well, I think we can concede that he has certainly achieved that here.

Let me tell you of a rather taciturn and cautious friend, a married man, who expressed to me, before the apostolic exhortation was published: “O I do hope he avoids ambiguity”. Well, I think even the most pious reading of “Amoris Laetitia” cannot say that it has avoided ambiguity. To use Pope Francis’ own words, “widespread uncertainty and ambiguity” (n. 33 ) can certainly be applied to this document, and I venture to say, to his whole papacy. If we are put into the impossible situation of critiquing a document of the ordinary magisterium, consider whether in “Amoris Laetitia” Pope Francis himself is relativizing the authority of the magisterium, by eliding the magisterium of Pope John Paul, specially in “Familiaris Consortio” and “Veritatis Splendor”. I challenge any of you to soberly reread the encyclical “Veritatis Splendor”, say nn. 95-105, and not conclude that there is a deep dissonance between that encyclical and this apostolic exhortation. In my younger years, I anguished over the conundrum: how can you be obedient to the disobedient? For a pope too, is called to obedience – indeed, preeminently so.

 

Go here to read the stunning rest.  In Amoris Laetitia we have a papal document that was completely at odds with the clear commands of Christ regarding marriage, and sought to change that teaching.  It attempted to do so behind a mask of obfuscation, planned confusion and outright mendacity.  These are the preferred methods of the current pontificate.

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Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Thursday, June 9, AD 2016 3:57am

Something has to be done to stop this Pontiff’s heresy. I guess the only things we can do is pray and fight back with essays like this until the Lord removes him from the Seat of St Peter. It’s clear he will not repent unless some miracle happens.

Philip
Philip
Thursday, June 9, AD 2016 6:02am

Legibus ambiguities in the house of Francis.

c matt
c matt
Thursday, June 9, AD 2016 8:27am

The real analogues of the pharisees in this whole affair are Kasper and his allies.

Of course. If every time Francis insults someone or some group, just think “projection,” and it will make sense.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, June 9, AD 2016 11:27am

I would wholeheartedly endorse one of the concluding remarks of Ms Silvas’s reflections.
“Being something of an ancient soul, I see this document as the bad fruit of certain second-millennium developments in the Western Church. I briefly point to two in particular: the sharply rationalist and dualist form of Thomism fostered among the Jesuits in the 16th century, and in that context, their elaboration of the casuistic understanding of mortal sin in the 17th century.”
It brought to mind Cardinal de Lubac’s encomium of Maurice Blondel: “Latin theology’s return to a more authentic tradition has taken place–not without some jolts, of course–in the course of the last century. We must admit that the main impulse for this return came from a philosopher, Maurice Blondel. His thinking was not primarily exercised in the areas proper to the professional theologians, nor did it base itself on a renewed history of tradition. Still, he is the one who launched the decisive attack on the dualist theory that was destroying Christian thought. Time after time he demonstrated the deficiencies of the thesis of the “extrinsicist” school, which recognized “no other link between nature and the supernatural than an ideal juxtaposition of elements which…were impenetrable to each other, and which were brought together by our intellectual obedience, so that the supernatural can subsist only if it remains extrinsic to the natural and if it is proposed from without as something important only in so far as it is a supernature…”

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Friday, June 10, AD 2016 3:05am

Thanks for posting an excerpt of Anna Silvas’s AL review. It is excellent. Readers here might find comments on this subject interesting on the Vox Cantoris blog:
http://voxcantor.blogspot.com/2016/06/alice-in-amoris-laetitia-land.html
One person in particular defends AL and thinks Anna’s review misleading.

Guy McClung
Admin
Friday, June 10, AD 2016 7:11am

Is the bigger picture the destruction of Church tradition authority in toto? In the eyes of many, if the Church is wrong about X (implemented by men in the past, and enforced) then it is also wrong about not only A, B, C but all of A through Z. And “wrong” is embodied in and now defined by JB’s NonNonCon principle, the principle of NonNonContradiction-a thing can simultaneously be and not be. This undercuts all of Scripture, the Catechism, every dogma, and anything previously declared “infallibly.” This endows the current pontiff-wheover and whenever-with unlimited power, because if there are no limits to truth, there are not limits to power – just ask Mao, Adolf, Barry Soetoro, Nero, PolPot, Fidel, that pudgy North Korean with nuclear dreams, and Hillarydemon. Adultery and sinful reception of Jesus’s Body and Blood are sins and they are not sins. Men (and women) voluntarily engaging in same sex sex is a sin against nature and it is an act of loving virtue. One end result of NonNonCon is the coalescence of earthly church [I know, contradiction in terms] power in whoever happens to be pontiff and those who pull his strings (or her strings as the future may be). Let us pray for God to cleanse His Church – before the 2018 “non magisterial” exhorting that (attempts) to extend not only the ministerial priesthood, but the episcopate and the Chair Of Peter to females and probably to males who self identify as having enlarged operational mammary glands. Guy McClung, San Antonio TX

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Saturday, June 11, AD 2016 3:47pm

I’m thinking, the next time a Francis apologist tosses out promethean neo-pelagianism, I’m going to toss back modernist-ultra-montanism.
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(The next time will be the first time, by the way.)

Guy McClung
Admin
Sunday, June 12, AD 2016 6:43am

Really – folks, other than praying, howling at the moon, living as holy as possible, and raging against the dying of the light in a few comments read by almost no one, what do we do? I for one do not want to sit back and enjoy inevitable ecclesial rape and behold, helpless, the attempted destruction of the Mystical Body Of Christ. If they are going to point their croziers at me and herd me onto an heretical boxcar, I want to refuse, and fight. How? Guy McClung, San Antonio, Texas

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