There’s been a lot of commentary and controversy over the document on love that released by Pope Francis on Friday morning. The fruit of a few years’ work – two synods and a process of pastoral inquiry (and much debating), it is almost 300 pages of pastoral guidance on approaching sometimes painful, intimate situations that involve knots and layers with both mercy and truth. I asked some experts — priests, professors, a psychologists, writers, and others — to check in when they had some time to read and digest Amoris laetitia (“The Joy of Love”). Some of their insights follow.
Rev. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P., adjunct instructor in moral theology, Dominican House of Studies:
Though none of Amoris laetitia’s nine chapters is superfluous — all deserve a careful reading — chapters 3-5 constitute the heart of the document. Therein, Pope Francis recapitulates the Church’s ancient tradition regarding the permanence, exclusivity, and fecundity of Christian marriage. His purpose in these chapters is to re-present the deposit of faith regarding marriage in light of the contemporary challenges to married life signaled by the world’s bishops in two recent synods on the family. To this end, the Holy Father makes copious use of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the writings of recent pontiffs. Pope Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930) receives confirmation in Amoris laetitia, as does Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968), John Paul II’s theology of the body and his own post-synodal exhortation on marriage, Familiaris consortio (1981), and Benedict XVI’s Deus caritas est (2005) and Caritas in veritate (2009). By drawing together these strands of the Church’s recent magisterium, Pope Francis weaves a compelling presentation of the truth of marriage—highlighting its divine origin and divine purpose—to present holy matrimony to an increasingly cynical world as not only a high ideal but also a good perfective of and accessible to every man and woman. At times, the pope’s esteem for the sacrament turns poetic. Like St. Paul, Pope Francis sings the praises of Christian love. He builds on the apostle’s great hymn to charity (1 Corinthians 12) to construct a catechesis of marital love detailing how charity’s many attributes (“love is patient, love is kind,” etc.) manifest themselves in the love of husband and wife (par. 90-119). Every lay person and every priest should read these central chapters of Amoris laetitia slowly and deliberately, imbibing from each page the saving wisdom repeated therein.
In Amoris laetitia’s latter chapters, Pope Francis turns his attention to the challenges to marriage faced by individuals and couples today. He addresses with a pastor’s heart those individuals in de facto unions, which, including cohabitation, function as a type of substitute for marriage. The pope addresses also those Catholics in “irregular” situations, namely the divorced and civilly remarried. To these he offers a special word of encouragement. The Church has consistently considered second marriages of such individuals adulterous, and thus a cause for the individuals’ exclusion — as long as they persist in adulterous activity — from full participation in the Church’s sacramental life. Pope Francis says nothing to second-guess this judgment, obedient as it is to the explicit teaching of Jesus. But he laments the fact that for many individuals in non-sacramental marriages their exclusion from the Church’s sacramental life has become a de facto exclusion from the whole of the Church’s life. Like Pope John Paul II before him (Familiaris consortio, par. 84), Pope Francis encourages the divorced and civilly remarried to resume their rightful role in the Christian community, even while a return to full sacramental communion may as yet remain impossible. With this resumption of an active ecclesial life in view, the Holy Father dedicates chapter 8 of Amoris laetitia to outlining a way in which pastors can “accompany” the divorced and remarried on a path of “discernment” to reintegrate them into the Church’s life. The pope draws both the language and the method of this accompaniment from his Jesuit tradition, which regards discernment as a means of perceiving one’s subjective state through an objective and divine lens. Accordingly, the Holy Father encourages priests to help the divorced and remarried to “understand their situation according to the teaching of the Church” (par. 300). This discernment should rely for guidance not only on everything Pope Francis details about marriage but also on all relevant passages from the Catechism of the Cathoilc Church and other magisterial descriptions of the Christian moral life, including John Paul II’s Veritatis splendor (1993). For Pope Francis, the goal of a couple’s discernment is to lead them, “where possible, to celebrate the sacrament of matrimony” (par. 78). Until that moment, the Church waits patiently and prayerfully with the couple for its restoration to sacramental communion, careful always to avoid both the harm and the scandal of unworthy receptions of the sacraments. As in the case of the miser, whose objective sin the pope notes prohibits him from receiving communion worthily (par. 186), anyone in an objectively sinful situation must avoid compounding his sin by committing sacrilege.
Christopher Kaczor,professor of philosophy, Loyola Marymount University:
“The Joy of Love” makes use of an ancient distinction between the objective morality of actions and the subjective culpability of agents. The document is black and white in terms of the high standards of behavior to which all followers of Christ are called. In other words, Pope Francis reaffirms the Church’s that marriage is about unconditional love between one man and one woman until death parts them. Their love is to be open to life, and every child is to be welcomed in life, even in the most difficult of circumstances because every human being is in God’s image. On the other hand, Pope Francis also acknowledges countless shades of grey in terms of the circumstances and subjective responsibility of agents. Some agents knowingly and willingly fail to love others as they should and thereby undermine their relationship with God in such a way that they should not receive communion. Other agents do not live according to the objective moral standards but in the concrete circumstances their subjective culpability is mitigated. Whatever their marital situations, all Christians fail to a greater or lesser degree, with greater or lesser culpability, to love are God and neighbor properly. Whatever their marital situation, all Christians are invited to respond in mercy to those in need and invited to participate in the life of the Church in ways appropriate for them in their own concrete situation. Since we cannot know the intentions and culpability of others, we cannot judge other people, even those living in situations which objectively do not correspond to the teachings of the Church.
My favorite part of “The Joy of Love” is the passage in which Pope Francis cites this powerful quotation from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
“The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls ‘the image of God’, you begin to love him in spite of [everything]. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off… Another way that you love your enemy is this: when the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it… When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system… Hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and so on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil… Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love”.
Hilary Towers, a developmental psychologist:
This final work of the synod is important because it calls to the attention of the entire world the importance of lifelong, faithful marriage. “Family” is, of course, a magnificent, God-given reality but in recent times the term has been divorced (pardon the pun) from its rightful origin: the permanent, faithful bond of a husband and wife. In the pope’s words: “Children not only want their parents to love one another, but also to be faithful and remain together…The child who is born ‘does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment.’” Francis and the Synod fathers show us in The Joy of Love that they understand marriage has suffered deep wounds, and that its revitalization is a high priority for the Church and the world.
We expect strong theology from a Pope, and of course all the theological underpinnings of marriage are laid out clearly and convincingly in Amoris Laetitia. What we don’t necessarily expect is the keen psychological insight Francis shows in the earlier portions of this document — particularly in chapters four and six. Here he delves deep into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to hold a marriage together in a culture where it is “more common to think that, when one or both partners no longer feel fulfilled, or things have not turned out the way they wanted, sufficient reason exists to end the marriage. “Were this the case,” Francis correctly observes, “no marriage would last.”
Throughout portions of the document the Holy Father employs the metaphor of marriage as a “lifelong project” — for those who remain committed through crises and hardship, there is the promise of a mature love, ever-new: “In the life of married couples, even at difficult moments, one person can always surprise the other, and new doors can open for their relationship, as if they were meeting for the first time. At every new stage, they can keep ‘forming’ one another. Love makes each wait for the other with the patience of a craftsman, a patience which comes from God.” What a beautiful framework for preparing the engaged for the reality of married life (a need Francis emphasizes repeatedly, and winningly, in Amoris Laetitia). Indeed, the section of the document entitled, “The Challenge of Crises” in chapter 6 (#232-238) should be required reading for every engaged couple.
Of course, the challenge we face as a Church is the question which brought so much attention and debate during the 2014 and 2015 synods: what is the most effective way, in a pastoral sense, to reverse the tide of the multiple threats to marriage that exist today – most of which Francis addresses with force and clarity (one significant omission in the list is the scourge of “no fault” divorce for untold numbers of Catholic men and women upon whom divorce is literally forced).
Beginning in Chapter 8 (“Accompanying, Discerning and Integrating Weakness”) there seems to me to be a significant break in the strong psychological insight that characterized earlier chapters. Central to the problem is a lack of specificity concerning various groups who find themselves in “irregular situations:” “Single-parent families often result from the unwillingness of biological mothers or fathers to be part of a family; situations of violence, where one parent is forced to flee with the children; the death of one of the parents; the abandonment of the family by one parent, and other situations. Whatever the cause, single parents must receive encouragement and support from other families in the Christian community, and from the parish’s pastoral outreach.” (emphasis mine).
The Holy Father — quite appropriately — presents us with the question of mercy in these last chapters. How do we convey mercy and charity to those “on the fringes?” But the causes of these irregular situations vary widely, and they matter. They matter not just to the individual families involved (now and in future generations), but to entire communities who are watching to see whether the Church really cares about fidelity and permanence as we say we do. Where one mother has an affair and forces a divorce upon the family she created, another mother does everything she can to save her marriage to an unfaithful husband. Is the Church merciful to the spouses, children, and communities involved if it treats the women in these two situations the same?
The exhortation seems to suggest such distinctions don’t matter: “It is important that the divorced who have entered a new union should be made to feel part of the Church. ‘They are not excommunicated’ and they should not be treated as such, since they remain part of the ecclesial community….Language or conduct that might lead them to feel discriminated against should be avoided, and they should be encouraged to participate in the life of the community.’”
The distinction is critical, not because we are looking to assign blame or “fault.” It is critical for the men and women who, in order to continue in their role as the responsible parent need and deserve to be affirmed as having made the right decision by putting family first. Perhaps most importantly, it is critical for those young people in our families, schools, churches, and communities who are watching and learning from our treatment of “reluctantly divorced” spouses about the value of marriage in our society today.
Human beings are indeed frail. We are weak and we falter. It is for this reason that we require a mercy and charity our culture no longer recognizes as such – the kind that has our long-term interests (and those of our families) in mind. Humans are highly motivated by the influence of family members, friends, and yes, even clergy. Divorce, and spousal abandonment, are often long processes, with many opportunities for intervention that might bring about reconciliation.
Once a spouse chooses to leave behind the moral and physical boundaries of the marriage, he or she often exposes the children to people and experiences that threaten their moral, emotional, psychological, spiritual and even physical development. To openly challenge the behavior of such a spouse can mean discomfort for those involved because it involves fraternal correction. But if the Church believes that marriage is permanent and true, shouldn’t reconciliation be our goal? “New unions” – most often with adultery partners – are not inevitable. Those Americans (or inhabitants of Western nations) who comprise these new unions need not fear “discriminatory language.” On the contrary, the widespread and growing existence of such unions is in large part a tragic consequence of silence on the part of those who owe them more.
Jacob W. Wood, assistant professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville:
Amoris Laetitia is important because of how Pope Francis relates mercy to justice.
Many popular conceptions of mercy, such as that which seems to animate the Kasperite proposal, pit mercy and justice against one another: the purpose of mercy, so the argument goes, is to cancel out some of the demands of justice, because those are “too hard” and “too unrealistic.”
By contrast, Pope Francis says that “mercy is the fullness of justice and the most radiant manifestation of God’s truth.” (AL 311) There is no conflict between justice and mercy. God’s mercy completes and perfects justice, because it is only by his merciful grace that we are enabled to live a just life. Defining mercy in this way represents a radical rejection of the Kasperite proposal. Every instance of access to the Sacraments has to meet the complete demands of justice and truth, even though it is by mercy that we are enabled to do so.
Kasper’s vision of mercy isn’t just easy for the divorced and remarried; it’s easy for pastors. Pastors simply waive the demands of justice and truth; the faithful enjoy the “get out of jail free card” that this dispensation from the universal call to holiness affords them; pastors enjoy their own “get out of jail free card” from the difficulty of having figuring out how to help heal very broken situations, how to challenge and of comfort those whom God has entrusted to them. Such pastors are no different than the ones Pope Francis mentions who simply “spout the rules” without descending into the mire to help people figure out how to follow them. (AL 308) Kasper’s pastors play by their own rules, but rules by any other name are still rules. Both groups are avoiding the true labor of the vineyard, which is the cultivation of souls. And as God told Adam in the garden, cultivation is hard work (Gen. 3:19)!
Pope Francis’s vision of mercy is a lot more difficult. Pastors have to be “merciful like the Father.” On the one hand, if God simply spouted the demands of justice at us, without coming down from heaven to find us in our sin, every single one of us would be lost. Pastors cannot simply repeat the rules from the pulpit–they are challenged to be like the Father and to come down in search of the lost (AL 305). By contrast, if God simply waived the demands of justice for us, without binding up our wounds to heal us from our sin, every single one of us would despair of the true joy that healing brings. When Pastors find those lost souls, they have to be willing to get their feet “muddy” in the mire of broken lives and broken relationships, discerning ways of bringing those lives and relationships back to the fullness of justice and truth (AL 308). Yet however painful this may seem, it is the secret to the joy of love: that God has not forsaken us no matter how much we may have forsaken him, and that the Church, which brings us God’s love, refuses to forsake us either. However far we may have wondered from justice and truth, we can trust that mercy is on its way to us from God through his Church. And mercy will not wait around the corner waiting for us to find it. Mercy will find us wherever we are, and with tenderness and compassion lead us home.
I’ll share a few more insights before the day is through, for those interested. – KJL
A Priest, A Psychologist, Professors: The Joy of Love by Pope Francis