The Argentine Bishops’ intepretation of Amoris Laetitia is official

Dec 15, 2017

By Massimo Faggioli
Changes in canon law don’t come quickly. But the news that Pope Francis has officially recognised the interpretation of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia put forth by Argentine Bishops indicates that change does, nevertheless, occur.

That interpretation, on “accompanying, discerning, and integrating weakness” in regard to the issuing of sacraments, was expressed in a September 2016 pastoral letter that was also addressed to Francis.

It includes guidelines noting that there is no such thing as “unrestricted access to the sacraments,” but that, in some situations, a process of discernment “opens the possibility” to receipt of communion for divorced and remarried Catholics. In accepting that interpretation, Francis wrote (in Spanish) to the delegate of the pastoral region of Buenos Aires that “it fully explains the meaning of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia. There is no other interpretation. And I’m sure it will do a lot of good.”

This counts as big news, but there are also some additional interesting facts about it. One is that Francis made his approval of this local interpretation public by having the epistolary exchange published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the official gazette of the Holy See.

It’s also worth noting what appears at the end of Francis’ letter: specification of the Pope’s will, communicated in an audience on June 5, 2017, that “these two documents [the letters] be published on the Vatican website and in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, as authentic magisterium [velut Magisterium authenticum].”

This not only expresses Francis’ “authentic interpretation” of that particular passage of Amoris Laetitia, but also elevates that interpretation to the level of official Church teaching.

The constitution of Vatican II on the Church, Lumen Gentium, paragraph 25, codifies the meaning of “authentic magisterium” this way: “[R]eligious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will.”

Papal approval of the Argentine guidelines means, for certain, that “it will now be more difficult to defend any opposition to this ‘open’ interpretation of Amoris Laetitia’s Chapter VIII”, as Marie Malzac wrote in La Croix International. Just as certain is that there will be another wave of reactions from those who think Francis’ teaching on family and marriage is not Catholic, accusations that were already being levelled at the synods of 2014 and 2015, well ahead of the publication of Amoris Laetitia.

Francis’ teaching in the form of approval of a local interpretation of a papal or conciliar document is atypical but not without precedent. Consider the exchange between Pius IX, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and the German bishops in 1875 during the Kulturkampf (“culture war”) waged by the German Reich against Catholics. When Bismarck accused Prussian bishops of having become “branch managers” of the pope after the Vatican I declaration of papal primacy, the bishops responded with a defence of their episcopal function, with Pius IX confirming their interpretation of papal primacy. This exchange is a key part in the interpretive history of Vatican I; it was printed in the famous collection of Church teaching, the Denzinger, and was also cited in the footnotes of Lumen Gentium, supporting a crucial chapter on the papacy and episcopal collegiality. In other words, the exchange has become an integral part of the Catholic tradition. As paradoxical as it may sound, over these last 150 years, the path of decentralisation of the Catholic Church also went through Vatican I, the epitome of ultramontanism and of the “Romanisation” of Catholicism.

One of the differences between 1875 and today is that the Kulturkampf is now inside the Catholic Church. The “dubia” against Amoris Laetitia and the campaign by some Catholic media to delegitimise this Pope are pretty much without precedent in the history of the modern papacy. But this has not stopped Francis. Now, having lost the ecclesial battle, the anti-Francis fringes are targeting Amoris Laetitia more from a juridical and canonical point of view. They contend that the letter published in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, in its present form, does not change the Code of Canon Law, canon 915: “Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.” --Commonweal Magazine