Three bishops dissent from Amoris Laetitia and confuse discipline for unchanging truth

Saint Basil Dictating His Doctrine painting by Francisco de Herrera the Elder

Today three bishops (one retired) from Kazakhstan published a statement of dissent from Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (AL), which allows for some remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments. One of the signatories, Athanasius Schneider, is an outspoken traditionalist who has written for the extreme website Rorate Caeli. Subsequently, it has been reported that the statement has received additional signatures from two retired, (in)famous Italian bishops. Luigi Negri retired shortly after he may have implied that he wanted someone to assassinate Pope Francis, apparently because Negri was unhappy with his recent appointments of Italian bishops. Carlo Maria Viganò was the Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. from 2011-16, and was reportedly responsible for the pope's "meeting" with Kim Davis, the county clerk who briefly went to jail for refusing to allow her office to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Anyway, this statement appears to have been prompted by the pope's recent elevation of the guidelines issued by the Buenos Aires bishops to the level of "authentic magisterium." Indeed (to their credit), the bishops acknowledge that the change to the Church's discipline has been accepted "by the supreme authority of the Church." Strangely, this fact does not appear to have given them pause, so convinced are they of the absolute correctness of their position.

This statement of opposition from two active and three retired bishops is de facto more significant than the so-called Filial Correction, which only two bishops signed, one the head of the schismatic SSPX (whose opinion is therefore inconsequential) and the other the retired bishop of Corpus Christi, Texas. (The rest of the signatories were little more than a "Who's Who" of traditionalist scholars and clerics.) Bishops are like generals in that they don't normally rock the boat unless they are retired. Unlike that document, this one – entitled Profession of the Immutable Truths about Sacramental Marriage – does not accuse the pope of heresy but only of proposing "a discipline alien to the Tradition of the Catholic and Apostolic faith."

Much of the statement merely repeats traditional arguments for the sacramental ban against remarried people, which I will not argue about here. Instead, I will examine the underlying theology, typical of traditionalism, which regards nearly every aspect of the Catholic religion as eternally unalterable and fixed by divine fiat. "The Church does not change" is their rallying cry. The bishops formulate this belief in a striking, even breathtaking phrase: "the unchanging truth and the equally immutable sacramental discipline of the indissolubility of marriage." Given that immutable is a synonym for unchanging, this phrase equates truth and the discipline of the Church, making them "equally" timeless. But how can the Church's sacramental discipline be equated with eternal truth itself? I would not bat an eye at referring to Catholic beliefs about the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection as "unchanging truths," but canon law cannot be put on the same level!

The bishops appear to me to confuse categories that must be strictly delimited. Let me offer at least four, which I believe any Catholic theologian would confirm are distinct.

First, there is divine revelation itself; that is, God's self-revelation in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word of God. This revelation surpasses all human understanding and can be apprehended only as "through a glass, darkly" (1 Cor 13:12 KJV). This, and not words, is what Christians believe in. We believe in God, who has revealed himself to us.

Second, there is the verbal articulation of our faith in the Creed and other dogmas of faith (for example, that Christ has two natures, divine and human, united in one person). As important as the dogmas are, they are not the faith itself. As St. Thomas says (quoted in the Catechism, 170), "The believer's act [of faith] does not terminate in the propositions, but in the realities [they express]" (Summa theologiae II-II, 1, 2, ad 2). Creeds and other dogmatic formulae are very useful for lighting up the path of faith. Nevertheless, they are historically-conditioned, and thereby limited, expressions of revelation. They are even subject to further development in accordance with the laws of the development of doctrine in the Church (a topic for a future post). St. Basil the Great well expresses the limitation of dogma at the opening of his his Homily on Faith:

It is pious to keep God in mind without ceasing, and the soul who loves God finds no satiety in this, but it is audacious to expound upon God in speech. For our mind has fallen quite far from the dignity of the true realities, and moreover our speech communicates our thoughts obscurely. So then, if our mind is so distant from the gradeur of the true realities and our speech is even more inadequate than our mind, how are we not compelled to keep silent, so that the wonders of theology do not seem to be diminished by the poverty of our words? (Trans. Mark DelCogliano, On Christian Doctrine and Practice, 254)

Third, non-dogmatic doctrine, which is neither definitive nor, strictly speaking, divinely revealed, though it is based on Scripture and tradition. According to the jargon of Catholic theology, we "hold" (tenere) or assent to doctrine, rather than "believe" it with divine faith. This is not to denigrate it, but to place it in its rightful place, not allowing it to usurp the fundamental confession of faith in God alone. This doctrine includes everything that the Catholic Church teaches beyond the dogmas of faith, including, for example, the documents of Vatican II, the Catechism, papal documents, etc. As my previous post indicates, doctrine in this sense is not proposed infallibly, and may even be deficient and in need of correction.

Fourth, the disciplines, laws, and customs of the Church. This category certainly includes sacramental discipline, as can be evidenced by looking at any collection of law in the Church, whether ancient, medieval, or modern. It is a fact of history that the Church's disciplines, customs, and laws have changed at different times and in different places. Now, I fully grant that they ought to be in accord with doctrine, dogma, and of course the faith itself, but that by no means makes them immutable! The entire debate about AL falls into these latter two categories, notwithstanding the false charges made in the Filial Correction that it runs afoul of certain dogmas.

The bishops provide no evidence for their bold claim that this particular discipline has always been in place in the Church (let alone immutably so!). They merely assert that the apostles themselves as well as "all the Supreme Pontiffs" upheld this rule "in an unequivocal way." Well, that is quite the assertion. Where in the New Testament do we read of this sacramental discipline? If tradition is to be the measure, then one must consider, as has been pointed out repeatedly (for example, in Cardinal Kasper's original speech on this subject to the cardinals), that Origen, St. Basil, and St. Epiphanius reference exceptions to the rule against remarriage! The latter two Fathers allow exceptions precisely when treating canonical questions. We have no idea what "all" the popes taught about anything (such an ahistorical phrase is only used by traditionalists), but Benedict XVI spoke about his opinion that some marriages that are celebrated in a Catholic church only to placate parents may not truly be sacramental. On this basis, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has argued that people who are convinced that their former marriage was not sacramental for this reason may validly receive the sacraments without an annulment. If we also consider the medieval practice of the so-called Petrine privilege and other declarations of nullity (which were unknown among the Fathers), we see that the Church's marriage discipline is in fact far from immutable. AL has loosened the rule a little more without revoking its substance.

The statement quotes St. Irenaeus and St. Thomas Aquinas about the universality of the faith, but then falsely infers from that that the Church's discipline must also be universal. This is flat-out wrong, and a perfect example of how they confuse categories. If their viewpoint were correct, it would mean that the Orthodox Churches (which accept up to two remarriages) have wrecked or nearly wrecked the Christian faith. Indeed, I suspect that is what the authors would say, if pressed. But Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, 14-18, which expresses the doctrine of the Church, explicitly accepts the legitimacy of the practices, disciplines, and customs of the Orthodox Churches (notwithstanding the unresolved issue of the papacy!). I can't quote the whole text, but one passage is especially significant, when it proclaims that, for the reunion of East and West, the Orthodox Churches need not alter anything of their customs and disciplines:

To remove, then, all shadow of doubt, this holy Council solemnly declares that the Churches of the East, while remembering the necessary unity of the whole Church, have the power to govern themselves according to the disciplines proper to them, since these are better suited to the character of their faithful, and more for the good of their souls. (16)

Tolerance of the Orthodox discipline of marriage had already been shown by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. The bishops there actually rewrote an initial draft of its condemnation of the Reformers' teaching that a marriage is dissolved by adultery, specifically to avoid condemning the Orthodox practice. (This topic was addressed by the semi-official Vatican journal La Civiltà Cattolica during the synod on the family, and has also been addressed by other theologians previously.)

To sum up: the monolithic, static view of ecclesial discipline espoused by these bishops unduly exalts matters of discipline to the level of essential doctrine. Although they may feel strongly that the discipline should not change, they can't credibly claim that it absolutely can't change, or that if it did, the Christian faith itself would be tarnished.