Amoris Laetitia and the Ordinary Catholic like Me

Karl Marx mused that religion was an opiate for people, a way of escaping hard reality. Well, if so, then somewhere along the line I missed the hand out of numbing solace religious faith supposedly provides. Putting aside for a moment whether faith is worth it from an eschatological point of view, one thing I can say about it is that it is very hard to be a Christian. For my money it is harder indeed to be a member of the progenitor Christianity, Catholicism. When I was growing up, the dogmatic schema and its application were one and the same. There were the "rules" laid down and if violated, led to various consequences up to and including Hell itself. Confession was the safety zone, if true contrition were manifest. It was unambiguous stuff. It was difficult, nearly impossible, but at least those who were part of the faith, knew for what they were striving.  At least you knew there were rules, that somebody, and/or Somebody knew better than you, that you could look into the theology maybe when you grew up, had moved to a more sophisticated locale and had the capacity to scratch the surface of Thomas Aquinas and find it sound. One problem, of course, is that the teaching of the faith back in those days did not much mention Aquinas or the Church Fathers. I mean, how do you explain all that stuff to five year olds? Or 20 year olds for that matter?

In the years since the various self-serving misinterpretations of Vatican II-which as it happens did not sanction the cowboy hijinks that gutted the liturgy, provide permission for the demolition of altar rails, or give apparent, but not de jure permission to "Sister Felicity" and "Fr. Kant" to redefine faith in terms of variable, and often contradictory, human reason, unattached to the Transcendent- the dogmatic and doctrinal schema got separated from their application. Application more and more became a matter of private interpretation of Scripture and veered into a private judgment of religious truth and the requirements for salvation. In the  private you decide ultimately what is good or what is not. And woe betide someone whose private good does not accord with your own, or vice versa. Truth is the province of the visceral. In Catholicity, at least, there was some staunching of the theological blood letting during the Pontificates of Saint John Paul II and Benedict--with reference back to the Objective. It was not enough to protect the average Catholic from constant ambiguity between what is taught by the Church and what the Church  "winked" away in Archdioceses and parishes around the nation.  If being a Catholic had been nearly impossible back when the rules and implementation were consistent, being one hit the event horizon of impossible for those of us who stayed with or came back to the faith after the revolutions of the 1960s.

I am troubled by the various groups that, in their way, take the road of private revelation which they decry in the modern Church. Their private revelation is that if the Church  restores the 1950s version of the faith, all will be well. A lot of them look at Francis and nod to themselves that we are in a time of sedes vacante (that there is no Pope on the Chair of Peter). Not so. Francis is the Pope. Where he will sit in terms of the judgment of history, I do not know. The Church has survived venal and violent Pope and Francis could never be said to be one of them. To me there is as much danger from the so-called Conservative Catholic who demands the return to ad orientum, Communion only on the tongue, and the chapel veil, as if nothing happened before the mid-20th century, as there is from the Progressive who would personally dictate the direction of the Novus Ordo into a dance free form.

This has been a long preamble. I hope you are still with me.

Those who have critiqued Amoris Laetitia and issued the "filial correction" that has been, shall we say, ignored by Pope Francis, believe, according to the December 2017 New Oxford Review, that the Pope is supporting positions on the Sacrament of Marriage, and the reception of Holy Communion, and on the moral life which are in error, if not heresy. (p. 19). The NOR posits seven problematic propositions presented by the Pope.

As quoted by NOR, I note five of them:

"1.  that God's Grace is insufficient to allow a justified person to carry out the demands of the divine law, as if the commandments were impossible for the justified to fulfill.
. . .

3.  that a Christian can have full knowledge of a divine law and voluntarily choose to break it but not be in a state of mortal sin as a result.
. . .

5.  that sexual acts between persons who have contracted a civil marriage, although one or both of them is sacramentally married to another, can be morally right or requested or even commanded by God.

6.  that moral principles and moral truths contained in divine revelation and the natural law do not include negative prohibitions that absolutely forbid particular kinds of actions;

7.  and that Christ wills that the Church abandon her perennial discipline of withholding the Eucharist from the divorced and 'remarried' who do not express contrition and a firm purpose of amendment."

If what the Pope writes in Amoris Laetitia, related to Catholics who have divorced and remarried civilly to receive Communion while continuing in the civil marriage--and most significantly, continuing to engage in the conjugal benefits- stands, then the conduct of a single woman is open to similar flexible interpretations, not merely de facto, as has been the reality of the last 50 plus years, but, with the Pope's un-clarified position on marriage and sexuality, de jure. 

I am sure I am not alone, but I struggled deeply with the Church's discipline, complicated by my own psychological inhibitions. I left the Church in the 1970s because I did not believe I could carry out the demands of my faith. I was not a very nuanced individual in a nuanced world, and the idea that I could break what was God's law as promulgated by the Church and not be in the state of mortal sin simply seemed mutually exclusive. I did think the Church's discipline was beyond me. I certainly could be contrite, so much so it was torture, but I did not believe I could form or express the purpose of amendment. 

I didn't leave the Church, so much as run away from it.  I couldn't be inside picking and choosing what I would accept. And I couldn't reject my faith outright. To be brutally honest, looking back, I sometimes wish I had done one or the other. I have a not so grudging respect for those who have made and do make a decision, and are content.  I suppose, since I suffer from ruminating OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) in all other areas of my life, I was doomed to marinate in indecisiveness about my faith. I was gone for a very long time. I came back just before I turned 30. As I sit here, I can't quite express what my thinking was. It was something along the lines that I needed to be inside the faith, with all of its inconsistencies, in danger of picking and choosing, rather than outside of it whirling without an anchor. I thought, perhaps, that I would get irrevocably lost in a world that, even in the 1980s, was bordering on the insane. 

Here's the thing I realize as I have been writing, Amoris Laetitia  makes me more than a little angry. If certain things are not True, and if we are free in fact to vary what has heretofore been posited as unerring Truth by acting as we will, it always was so, and I have been among the unmitigated fools, who suffered a purely unnecessary struggle. Let's me put it this way--I should have been having a lot more fun in this world, because when you get right down to it, even inside the Catholic Church, there is no sin. There is always a way to explain it away. 

I ran across a quote by The Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. "Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote.  Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right."

Sometimes my head hurts when I contemplate what I am or ought to be, as a Catholic. I agree with the Archbishop. But the problem has come to be, even at the hands, perhaps particularly at the hands of my Church, that it seems even the most assiduous thinker could not fathom when wrong is wrong, and right is right, or where any of us falls in the determination. Sometimes I want to scream, like a kid in a classroom with an obfuscating teacher, "Just tell me what the right answer is!"

If you believe in the Guidance of the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit will somehow coalesce all of it, and all of us. In my more cheerful days, I believe that. And I pray for it.