That the strongest resistance is coming largely from the global south and the developing world only reinforces the already powerful impression that Pope Francis’s solicitude for “the peripheries” is only so much talk.
By Christopher R. Altieri at The Catholic World Report:
It isn’t every day that the top papal lieutenant goes on the record to discuss something about which he’d just said there would be no further clarification, but that’s what just happened in an interviewpublished by The Pillar with the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
That’s one of the things that happened, at any rate, in connection with a story that has dominated headlines in both the Catholic and secular mainstream press all week.
Cardinal Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández on Monday issued a declaration, Fiducia supplicans, permitting some sort of blessing for “couples in irregular unions” including same-sex couples who “spontaneously” ask for them.
The declaration made headlines instantly and continued to generate copy all week and into the weekend, both in the secular mainstream press and in Catholic circles.
Much of the secular reportage was passable and some of it was good, but most of the early headlines were hyperventilating and inaccurate, giving some leading Catholic figures occasion to accuse ill-informed secular outlets and agenda-driven Catholic mastheads of ginning up controversy.
Bishops, however, made it impossible to credit the “blame the media” line, when they began to issue their own statements in reaction to the document. Reaction from individual prelates and whole national conferences began coming in short order, and haven’t stopped.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith—that’s The Thing That Used To Be The Pope’s “Doctrinal Watchdog”—formerly responsible for the needful but mostly humdrum work of guaranteeing that Vatican documents and Catholic theological publications meet minimum standards of orthodoxy, is the outfit Pope Francis tasked with producing Fiducia supplicans, a work of pastoral trailblazing and doctrinal innovation.
More precisely, Pope Francis entrusted the work to DDF’s newish prefect, Fernández, who had promised something in the way of blessings almost as soon as he was in his new billet.
Fiducia supplicans is crowded with caveats and brimming with qualifications, many very carefully drawn, over 5,000 words. It is evident that the declaration’s author and his commissioning principal both knew it would make waves. But it is unlikely either Fernandez or Pope Francis expected the tsunami of reaction that came in short order.
Some dioceses—mainly though not exclusively in western Europe—made a show of enthusiastically embracing the business, even though a facial reading of Fiducia would require many of them to halt plans for para-ritual blessings of gay unions or even roll back policies already articulated, for the implementation of which blessing formulae have already received at least preliminary local approval.
From other jurisdictions—many of them geographically located in the global south—the reception ranged from frigid to actively hostile, with several national bishops’ conferences flatly refusing to implement the declaration at all.
The cardinal-president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conference of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), Fridolin Ambongo, issued a call mid-week for talks among African bishops with a view to preparing a unified “continental” response.
That is a politically fascinating development, since it came from a fellow who is a member of Pope Francis’s C9 “small council” of cardinal advisors. It raises the question whether Ambongo has deployed a temporizing measure in hope of allowing Francis to walk things back. Alternatively, he may have thrown in with his continental confreres in the episcopate, many of whom have already balked at Fiducia supplicans.
At least one Church sui iuris, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, basically said the declaration applies only for Latin-rite (Roman) Catholics and is null within Ukrainian Greek ritual jurisdiction. The UGCC statement, however, also strongly suggested reasons beyond the merely legal and jurisdictional for refusing to heed Fiducia supplicans.
“[T]he blessing of a priest always has an Evangelical and Catechetical dimension,” the statement from UGCC Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk reads, “and therefore can in no way contradict the teaching of the Catholic Church about the family as a faithful, indissoluble, and fruitful union of love between a man and a woman, which Our Lord Jesus Christ raised to the dignity of the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony.”
“Pastoral prudence urges us to avoid ambiguous gestures, expressions and concepts that would distort or misrepresent God’s word and the teaching of the Church,” Shevchuk writes.
That’s a judgment he can make for the Church he governs, but his language succinctly states reasons adduced by a great host of bishops from all around the world in response to the DDF declaration.
“For those who read the text serenely and without ideological prejudices,” Fernández told The Pillar in the email exchange published Saturday, “it is clear that there is no change in the doctrine on marriage and on the objective valuation of sexual acts outside the only [kind of] marriage which exists — male-female, exclusive, indissoluble, naturally open to the generation of new life.”
It’s nice to have the DDF prefect on record saying there isn’t any change in said points of doctrine, but the fact he had to say it itself makes it difficult to credit the idea that there is much clarity in either Fiducia’s particular propositions or the theological articulation it gives for them. Now, the practical realities facing both the DDF prefect and his principal are indeed daunting.
The purpose of Fiducia supplicans appears to have been twofold: It was to rein in bishops and bishops’ conferences that have already gone too far—think Belgium and Germany—and also encourage reticent bishops to loosen up. Fernández has now all but admitted in words that the attempt failed spectacularly on both counts.
“I recognize that the reception of these documents requires time, and a serene and prolonged reflection,” Fernández told The Pillar. “What is important is that these bishops’ conferences are not holding a doctrine different from that of the declaration signed by the pope,” he also said, “because it is the same doctrine as always.”
Regarding bishops’ conferences that have already approved quasi-ritual blessing formulae or are on their way toward approving them, Fernández said: “[T]his is inadmissible.”
“They should reformulate their proposal in that regard,” Fernández said.
Fernández also spoke of meetings upcoming between German bishops engaged in their own “synodal way” and various dicastery heads in Rome. Fernández also mentioned his own plans to visit Germany for “conversations” he believes will be “important.”
More broadly, “[W]e are currently discussing these issues with presidents of bishops’ conferences and with groups of bishops visiting the dicastery,” Fernández said. That sounds like the phones are busy both at DDF and in the Domus Sanctae Marthae where Pope Francis lives. It also sounds like Fiducia supplicans is on the agenda for bishops coming on their periodic ad limina visits. It also sounds like a prefect blindsided and flummoxed, temporizing and at some pains—not to say “desperate”—to make it look like he has a handle on things. It looks like a fellow trying to put lighting in a bottle, or at least closing a barn door after the horse has fled.
Lots of folks are asking why the consultation is only happening now? Frankly, it’s a good question. That the strongest resistance is coming largely from the global south and the developing world only reinforces the already powerful impression that Pope Francis’s solicitude for “the peripheries” is only so much talk.
Fernández, for his part, has staked a long and rocky row to hoe, insisting in the interview that bishops may not prohibit what the pope has permitted with Fiducia supplicans, especially since at least one national conference—Malawi—has already issued an explicit prohibition, in addition to the dioceses and conferences that have said they won’t be implementing it.
Pope Francis has put himself in an impossible situation. Popes do that, from time to time. It usually isn’t that big a deal. In the age of instant communications and 24-hour news cycles, however, a big enough crisis could put the implosion of a pontificate on display for the entire world, in real time. It may be too early to say whether that really is what we are seeing at present, but it is impossible to be sure we aren’t seeing it, and that is … bad enough.
Catholicism Pure & Simple 