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A new appearance and reality in today's church

Pope Francis' view of marriage is not liberal, it is just not impervious to human experience
A new appearance and reality in today's church

Pope Francis presides at the opening of the Pastoral Congress of the Diocese of Rome on June 16 at St. John Lateran Basilica in Rome. (Photo by AFP) 

Published: June 21, 2016 09:11 AM GMT
Updated: June 21, 2016 09:15 AM GMT

Pope Francis is surprisingly candid in denouncing things that Catholics do in the name of their faith just to keep up appearances.

He did so again most recently with a new document on ecclesial movements and in remarks on marriage. In both instances he demonstrated a refreshingly direct contact with reality, which only highlighted just how much the institutional church remains in a state of denial.

The first news of the week was that, after more than three years of silence, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) had finally published a new document. It is a letter directly inspired by Pope Francis called, Iuvenescit Ecclesia. It represents a policy change and a step towards a new relationship between ecclesial movements and bishops in discerning the role these movements and associations play in the Church through a particular charism.

The official launch of the letter at a Vatican press conference on June 14 was somewhat anticlimactic, however, given that the presenters were all representative of the status quo.

There were two cardinals who head major Roman Curia offices — Gerhard Ludwig Müller of the CDF and Marc Ouellet of the Congregation for Bishops. Then there was the leading priest-theologian of the Focolare Movement and president of the group's Florence-based university — Father Piero Coda (who is also a member of the International Theological Commission). And, finally, the panel also included a female theologian and professor at the Gregorian University in Rome — Carmen Aparicio Valls.

If this looked like a "business as usual" line-up, the content of Iuvenescit Ecclesia marks a change of direction. It is a document that explains how Pope Francis departs from some of the theological starting points that were typical of his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Those earlier pontificates viewed modernity in such a negative light that they welcomed whatever could shake up the church in the battle against secularism and help Catholicism reclaim lost territory. This meant embracing and granting special freedom — from bishops, not from the Vatican — to movements and associations and their expressions of the ecclesiology of Vatican II.

They included groups like Focolare and the Sant'Egidio Community, but also Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ, as well as other movements functional in the restoration of a reactionary, "law and order" kind of church. An emphasis was placed on filling up seminaries, no matter how candidates were recruited or trained.

By giving a green light to the movements, John Paul II and Benedict XVI heaped humiliation on the bishops by prohibiting them from supervising these new ecclesial entities in their territories. Additionally, they often filled vacant dioceses by appointing new bishops who from these movements. This mixture of political conservative ideology and thirst for power brought pastoral disaster to many local Catholic communities. A clear example is the Archdiocese of Lima (Peru), which has been led the past seventeen years by Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, a member of Opus Dei.

Iuvenescit Ecclesia acknowledges implicitly that in the recent past some mistakes were made in the relations between the institution and the new movements, and that the institutional church needs to be more vigilant. It admits that the so-called charisms can sometimes damage the spiritual life of the faithful (as Francis said in other speeches to Catholic movements).

This is a change in the Vatican's approach towards the movements. And it is clearly a change in how the pope sees the movements because he sees differently the relationship between the church and the world. It will be interesting to see what this might mean concretely, and how the movements will respond to the new letter. Father Coda of Focolare has welcomed the text, which is not surprising since he helped draft it. But other members of the various movements might be more wary of this policy change.

The other event last week that caused even more than slight wariness were Pope Francis' off-the-cuff remarks at the opening of the Diocese of Rome's annual pastoral conference on June 16 at the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome. He said many marriages today could be considered canonically invalid because "we are living in a culture of the provisional" and young people who marry often do not understand the meaning of a lifelong commitment. (The Vatican press office published a transcript the next day in which the pope's words were toned down, but that is beside the point here).

Francis said that in some cases pre-marital cohabitation could be a good thing if it helped a couple mature and prepared them emotionally and psychologically for sacramental marriage. His point was that sacramental marriage could be used to impose a shaky and merely superficial Catholicism on young people, just to make the Catholic Church look sociologically stronger and society more culturally Christian.

No wonder this caused such outrage among Catholic conservatives, especially in the United States. What Francis said — and the implications of what he said — are exactly the opposite of the idea of marriage in North American Catholicism. In a country like the United States, where the social and political functions of marriage are key to the moral and religious culture, the pre-modern and post-modern ideas of "family" are stronger than a modern idea of family that is dominant in secularized areas of the world like Europe and in Francis' Latin America.

But for many pastors (including the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, now Bishop of Rome) it is no longer true that premarital cohabitation and premarital sex are the ultimate moral hazard for young Catholics. And it is no longer true that encouraging early marriage is the best way to prevent such a hazard. But this is not the moral platform on which U.S. bishops were chosen in these last few decades, so it is no coincidence that many of these prelates see Pope Francis as a threat to the moral and social equilibrium of American Catholicism.

The new CDF letter, Iuvenescit Ecclesia, and the pope's recent remarks on marriage have some things in common. One element is Francis' lack of fear in acknowledging reality. Concerning the ecclesial movements he sees that some of the groups have done good for the church, while others have brought harm. And he is clear that the church cannot simply assume that charismatic figures are always good pastors just because they give the impression of a church fighting back against secularization.

Concerning marriage, he affirms that certain pastoral practices linked to the sacrament of marriage serve to sanctify people, while acknowledging that some sacramental marriages can do spiritual harm to people when the social and cultural norms surrounding the sacrament constrain the spiritual freedom of the faithful.

Another common element is about the role of the institutional church. Concerning the movements, the church is there to help discern the spirits. It verifies whether the charism helps build communion with God and with one another in the church, or if it serves the will of power of a charismatic figure or church leader. And concerning marriage, the church cannot become the enforcer of a social and cultural view of marriage that does not respond to the existential reality of the men and women of our time.

Francis' view of the ecclesial movements is not institutionalist, just prudent in light of the incidents and scandals of the last few years (which I have studied in my books Sorting Out Catholicism and The Rising Laity).

And his view of marriage is not liberal, it is just not impervious to human experience. Using a sacrament to keep up appearances (whether they be personal, social or ecclesial) is not in line with the pope's notion of church. The problem is that he and many of his brother bishops do not agree on the definition of appearance and reality in today's world and church.

Follow me on Twitter @MassimoFaggioli

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