PopeWatch: Better Days

The Pope’s statement that the great majority of sacramental marriages are invalid, and the retreat from what the Pope said, is continuing to reverberate. Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week has advice for Catholics about what to do when a Pope is given to making statements that are contra to the Faith or simply bizarre:

The pope’s statement openly contradicts the constant teaching and practice of the Church, which put great faith in the ability of humans to marry one another, and in the sacraments of the Church to be effective. The pope may be right that we live in a culture marred by impermanence. Previous cultures that the Church stepped into were marred by tribalism, or even local prejudice and tradition. Special pleading is not new to the world with modernity. The presumption of validity still applied to marriage bonds made inside or outside of the Church.

The Church has always held that valid marriage occurs whenever a single man and a single woman freely vow to marry one another, and intend to live faithful to that union for the rest of their lives. They don’t even have to be Catholics. The Church confidently strode into pagan Europe and affirmed the marriage bonds of non-Christians, who had never had a chance to be “catechized” or who married under greater social and familial pressures than any modern Westerner.

It is telling that the Vatican even “corrected” the transcripts of what the pope said, inserting “some” where he really said “vast majority.” That may reflect Francis wishing to step back from what he said, or it may just be an act of charity by Vatican staff to “cover his nakedness,” so to speak.

A pope’s off-the-cuff statements and personal opinions are not, and never have been, infallible guides. This presents no existential crisis for Catholicism.

So, what to do? The best advice, informed by centuries of history, is to just ignore or laugh at the pope when he says something so stupid. Popes in the past have expressed novel and erroneous views on matters of faith before. Pope John XXII argued for erring views on the afterlife. Pope John XII, who raped female pilgrims to Rome, was credibly rumored to have openly professed paganism.

In these cases and others, the “vast majority” of Christians held on to their faith, as best as they understood it, with no reference to their pope’s day-to-day controversies. Now that the meticulously careful theologian Josef Ratzinger is neither the pope, nor the pope’s ghostwriter, we’re likely to deal with many popes expressing themselves in spectacularly unhelpful or stupid ways. Forgive them, and move on.

Go here to read the rest.  Pope Francis was manifestly a poor choice to serve as Pope.  The traditional Catholic attitude when a Pope is a lemon is to resist where one must, but basically to duck and pray for better days under a better Pope.