“Bonkers,” is the only word for the week that was, especially on the Catholic news beat, and with particular regard for a set of official questions called dubia in the technical language of ecclesialese.
For those of you following from home, a dubium is a query concerning some more-or-less technical matter of doctrine or legal interpretation. Dubia usually come from senior churchmen with care of souls, who want to know the mind of the pope either as teacher or legislator, or both.
The standard practice is to couch the questions in a way that admits of a “Yes” or “No” answer, but that is to make it easier for the department official who actually fields the question to give a straightforward answer. Frequently, the Y or N reply receives some elaboration.
This past week, we learned about a set of dubia submitted to Pope Francis – the third such or similar set from a consistent group of cardinal doubters (ahem) – concerning a set of issues that have been grist for the mill since the pope’s 2016 post-Synodal Exhortation, Amoris laetitia. The first set of dubia (in)famously received no direct answer. A second set, different and framed in light of the synod assembly on synodality that opened last week and runs through the end of the month, did get a response in July of this year.
The cardinal doubters sat on those responses for well over two months. They didn’t like the formal structure of them – they weren’t Yes / No answers – but that wasn’t the only reason they kept them to themselves. In all fairness to the group of five who submitted the questions, the custom is for the pope and the Vatican to publish responses to dubia when and how they will.
In any case, the cardinals reformulated their questions so they could only receive a Y/N response, and resubmitted them. When they received no reply to their reformulated questions, they went public with them and let the public know that they had received responses to an earlier set of similar questions. The Vatican responded in short order, publishing the responses Pope Francis had given privately back in July.
A meltdown ensued, helped by Catholic and mainstream secular news outlets but driven mostly by a commentariat delirious with desire to have the pope say what they want him to say, either because they hope he will finally unambiguously get behind their pet causes or else finally and unambiguously declare himself to be just the kind of heretic they know him in their bones to be.
The whole spectacle was the very opposite of edifying.
When the crazy is turned up to eleven, the best thing to do is take a beat, find the core of quiet, and practice cold, hard analysis. That’s what I’ll try to do here, but let a fellow have his fun. Three refrains from pop songs – two classics and one current chart-topper – will frame my considerations.
You can’t always get what you want.
Whatever else Pope Francis has done by answering the dubia – not the old dubia, but the latest dubia – he has shown once again that he is a political master. He may have been counting on the dubia cardinals to do themselves dirty, but whether he was or he wasn’t, both the cardinal-doubters themselves and their coterie of malcontents certainly forgot the moral of The Rolling Stones’ 1969 hit, “You can’t always get what you want,” which is that you can get what you need – sometimes, anyway – if you try.
Right from the outset, the dubia cardinals have maintained that their chief concern is with doctrinal integrity. They have sought clear, unambiguous, unequivocal statements from the highest authority in the Church regarding what most folks understood to be settled points of teaching until Francis’s 2016 post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris laetitia, muddied the waters.
That’s not to say the dubia cardinals are without pastoral concerns. Quite the opposite, in fact. Doctrine has always been the firm foundation of pastoral practice, or if you will, the reliable chart by which one proceeds through dangerous waters. The Pope and his gang have been behaving as though the charts don’t matter.
Now, the waters may have changed and the charts we have may not be perfectly reliable. Charts never are perfectly reliable. There may be new soundings, or it may be time to take new soundings. The pope and his guys, however, appear to be operating without a care for charts at all, willing to pilot by something between instinct and intuition. They are also moving at speed through waters everyone knows are dangerous.
Even if it is occasionally necessary for a pilot to steer by sight and feel, it is always unwise to ignore the charts and madness to think that charts as such are unnecessary.
In fairness to Pope Francis, he is an uncannily gifted pilot of small craft. In one-on-one or small group settings, he is tremendously effective. The Hulu documentary that came out earlier this year will amply demonstrate his prowess in such situations to anyone willing to see it. Whether you prefer to think of the whole Church as a great galleon from the age of sail or a battleship or a liner or even an aircraft carrier, the one thing the barque of Peter isn’t, is small.
All this is to say that a merely candid view of the controversy will apprehend that there is tension between the pope and the dubia cardinals, who are nevertheless neither necessarily nor irreducibly opposed to one another over the paramount question of salus animarum, salvation of souls.
If the pope is a better small craft pilot than his implacable critics are willing to concede, folks on the other side would do well to let themselves see that the dubia cardinals have a better brief against the pope’s pilotage of the great ship that is the Church than they have heretofore recognized.
I’m not going to rehash the whole business. Suffice it to say that Pope Francis intended Amoris to be an official encouragement for the whole Church: an invitation to discernment, if you will, a conversation-starter that was supposed to get folks thinking – together and publicly – about a whole host of challenges to contemporary family life.
Instead, lots of Church jurisdictions decided to skip the talking and go straight to the part where local bishops issued “pastoral guidelines” amounting to a jumble of special legislation, no one piece of which really squared with any other. The bitter irony of that was twofold.
It poisoned the well, giving Pope Francis’s erstwhile champions in the chattering classes carte blanche to attack the genuinely perplexed and tar them with the “dissenter” brush, while simultaneously giving the pope’s implacable critics plenty at which to point and say – ipsa voce – “See?!? This confusion is what he wants!”
The conversation Francis said he wanted was supposed to help break out of excessive formalism and legal rigorism. Instead, the jump to special legislation effectively short circuited that effort, and almost nobody wondered how more legislation (or quasi-legislation) was supposed to combat excessive formalism or legal rigorism.
The problem Amoris kicked into overdrive, in other words, was never really one of doctrine at all, but of governance.
If the dubia cardinals were politically savvy themselves, they’d have published the responses they had back in July, declared victory, and gone home. They didn’t get everything they wanted. Doctrinally, however, they got everything they needed.
Distilled to their essence, the answers that came to the dubia cardinals in July did clarify all the fundamental questions that have arisen regarding settled Church teaching – from the perennial validity and “controlling” status of previous papal and conciliar magisterium, to more granular particulars like the need for some expression of repentance in order for a priest to give sacramental absolution and the Church’s inability to confer the Sacrament of Holy Orders on women – even and especially regarding the vexata quaestio of blessings to same-sex unions.
The answer to that last one was, in sum: No, you can’t bless unions as though they were marriages when they aren’t, but you should try to give blessings to people when they ask for them.
That’s not great, especially in light of the practice – increasingly common and at least semi-officially endorsed in certain jurisdictions – of either blessing unions that make a mockery of marriage or else blessing persons in those unions not only without adequately explaining what the blessing is and is not doing but essentially winking and nodding at the unions themselves.
No purely doctrinal pronouncement was ever going to stop that, no matter who is pope.
By insisting on another round of dubia after they didn’t like the formal structure of the answers they got, the dubia cardinals behaved like tinhorns or wet-behind-the-ears attorneys demanding – in front of a jury – that the judge reconsider, rather than seasoned trial lawyers who know that you raise an objection once to preserve the record and then move to the next thing. Insisting only shows the jury that you’re really upset and maybe a little afraid.
(Something not unlike this is a plot point for the trio of JAG lawyers who constitute the defense team in Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of A Few Good Men. One difference between the cinematic object lesson and real life is that the dubia cardinals got much more satisfactory answers from Pope Francis than the defense team for Cpl. Dawson and Pvt. Downey got from the judge, but I digress.)
The separate answers to Cardinal Duka’s dubia – did I not mention those? – arguably go even further toward preserving doctrine and even conceding significant ancillary points of criticism leveled at Amoris, namely that the document was poorly drafted and inadequately edited. They also expose the technocratic – not to say “micromanaging” – approach of Pope Francis’s chosen lieutenants, chiefly his new doctrine czar, Cardinal Victor Fernandez.
Most of that got mostly lost in the maelstrom that was last week.
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Pope Francis also made it clear to anyone with eyes to see that his erstwhile supporters – many of them at least in the chattering classes – are perfectly willing to use him as an instrument of their own policy agendas quite apart, and in fact regardless, of what the pope actually thinks and really says.
This was nowhere more crystalline than in the case of the response Pope Francis gave to a dubium regarding the practice of blessing same-sex unions.
“The Church has a very clear understanding of marriage,” the pope’s response began, “an exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to procreation. Only this union can be called ‘marriage’.” One may quibble with the manner and extent to which “other forms of union” may “realize” such a union, even “only in a partial and analogous way.” In any case, no union that is not marriage can be strictly called marriage.
Nor is this a mere matter of semantics.
“[T]he reality we call marriage,” Pope Francis continues, “has a unique essential constitution that requires an exclusive name, not applicable to other realities.” Crucially – and in answer to another vexed question that arose from the Amoris kerfuffle, “[Marriage] is undoubtedly much more than a mere ‘ideal’,” for which reason “the Church avoids any type of rite or sacramental that might contradict this conviction and suggest that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.”
The pope’s response goes on for two more paragraphs, the copious and very much non-linear verbiage of which boils down to: Don’t bless unions as though they were marriages when they aren’t, but bless people who ask for it whenever you can and look for reasons to bless everyone who asks.
There’s a lot to criticize in that approach. At the very least, it gives plausible cover – indeed, it appears to be giving instructions – to people who would bless unions on how to explain themselves and/or justify their actions to “rigid” and “backwardist” ecclesiastical superiors.
One thinks of Belgium, where the Flemish bishops have already published a blessing text. The wording of the response would seem to pump the brakes on their initiative, except they already got a wink and a nod from Francis for their initiative.
In Germany, where the Church is flush with government cash for the time being but is also bleeding members and at risk of seeing the government spigot turned off permanently – something that would have significant repercussions for Rome, which relies on German Church money – blessings of people and unions have received more-or-less official approval in various jurisdictions.
Then again, Germans have been causing trouble for civilization since the Teutoburg Forest disaster. “Germans get up to stuff that’s financially squirrelly and doctrinally suspect” is the quintessence of “dog bites man” newsworthiness.
That Pope Francis appears willing to let them do so is regrettable perhaps, but hardly the worst thing. His implacable critics – not the dubia cardinals themselves, but their mostly self-appointed acolytes and cheerleaders – preferred instead to pursue their pound of rhetorical flesh with this latest round of dubia, tying themselves in knots to make Francis plainly say something he plainly didn’t.
Elements in the Church and in secular media that have adopted or co-opted Francis – frequently with his connivance – for their pet social causes, well, they have done much the same from the other side.
There are different ways to slice the answer Pope Francis gave to the question regarding same-sex blessings. “Asked and answered by the CDF,” would have been fine for me and better than the answer that came. Francis’s rambling made the practical, nuts-and-bolts governance problem worse for everybody. It was always going to do that. He was never going to be the guy who governed well or wisely.
Anyone touting the response as any sort of opening to a change in Church teaching on marriage or the fundamental nature of conjugal relationship in general, however, is basically the ecclesiastical version of Lloyd Christmas when he took the gentle but unmistakable rebuff he’d just had from Mary Swanson and rejoined, “So, you’re saying there’s a chance?”
Whether for deluded desire or fear and loathing, folks on just about every side of this contretemps are at best guilty of wishful thinking.
That’s why the lyric for this turn is from Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” – released as a single in the spring of 1969 and included on Bridge over Troubled Water about a year later – a tremendous lament of discontented civility. “I am just a poor boy,” the song begins, “Though my story’s seldom told,” and then:
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises;
All lies and jest,
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.
One ought to resist every temptation to wax maudlin, but frankly the whole business is depressing. One is given to think the people on every side of Pope Francis rather more interested in manufacturing controversy than they are in doing pretty much anything else.
I should’ve known it was strange…
As John L. Allen Jr. pointed out in his analysis column dealing with this dreadful business last week, these latest dubia are not so much real questions as they are a rhetorical exercise – like academics at a conference Q&A session after a paper, who offer their own take in a lengthy preface to something that may or may not end in a formal query but really doesn’t call for an answer – designed to register points regardless of whether it succeeds in clarifying any genuine issue.
Allen also points out that the one thing Pope Francis surely has done by answering the July dubia and publishing the answers just ahead of the synod’s opening is to “scramble the deck” ahead of the assembly that has been billed as “the greatest listening exercise in the history of the Church” and the capstone of Francis’s pontificate, apt to chart the Church’s course into the third millennium.
That’s a tall order.
How anyone could possibly be taken in by the overblown, oversold, super-hyped synod proposition is beyond me. “Sell the sizzle, not the steak,” is the old marketing adage, and it is fine. Only, there has to be a steak. This gathering of prelates and various other invited guests – stakeholders and experts and sundry amici curiae – was never going to be too much different from any of the other highly managed and meticulously packaged affairs that have given the mitred classes and their retainers an excuse to haunt the bars and restaurants of the Borgo Pio for a few glorious weeks of ottobrata romana for nearly sixty years.
Pope Francis may well have big stuff in store for later, after the curtain has dropped and everyone has gone home. There could be some drama during the three weeks of sessions this month. The whole show isn’t slated to wrap until 2024, after a final gathering. So far, the business has been predictably farcical.
There was a gag order put on participants and a press blackout on synod sessions that the synod managers from Francis on down tried to sell as “fasting” and a form of “ascesis” apt to encourage a posture of listening among the participants themselves. After one big wig – Cardinal Gerhard Müller – did his own thing with EWTN, gag orders and blackouts be damned, the head of the Vatican’s communications dicastery, Paolo Ruffini, announced that the gag order wasn’t an order at all but “a personal discernment the pope asked of the members.”
“The discernment is left to each individual person,” Ruffini explained. “[I]t’s not that there’s a gendarme that punishes,” the loose-lipped, Ruffini told journalists.
“Gotta laugh at the stupidity,” sings the talented 20-year-old Disney alumna, Olivia Rodrigo, on her smash hit “Vampire” – the lead single on her sophomore album, GUTS – an instant Gen Z anthem sung from the sadder but wiser girl’s point-of-view.
Speaking of guts, it took some for the dubia cardinals to press their case, whatever you think of it.
It is fair to note that they published the second set only after they didn’t receive a response. The Pope could have let them know he’d received their second set of dubia and considered his responses to the first set sufficient and the whole matter therefore closed.
It is worth mentioning in this connection that the whole template and modus operandi for ecclesiastical business – basically to keep everything secret till the final outcome, and maybe not tell anyone what we decided or how we reached our decision even then – is utterly disastrous.
Confidentiality is necessary, but it is always in service to the integrity of processes – judicial, administrative, political as they may be – and always is in tension with the right of the governed to know the character and conduct of their governors. The management of that tension is a matter of discretion, which is impossible to learn, let alone practice, in a climate of poisonous secrecy.
Perhaps the anthem of this epoch really ought to be “Sweet Little Lies” by Fleetwood Mac.
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