The disorders of this pontificate undoubtedly call for a remedy. But how to go about it?
It would best be done by our Holy Father himself, before his pontificate ends. A Hermeneuticon ad Exhortationem Amoris laetitia plenius interpretandam, giving that document an unambiguously orthodox interpretation, and issued motu proprio, would be one way of doing it ... the cleanest, simplest, and most Frank way.
Otherwise, how could it be done by the later pontiff to whom this disagreeable duty will fall? Here is my suggestion.
Involve the world-wide episcopate; because, cum et sub Petro, they are (as Leo XIII put it) Judges of the Faith. Their formal judgements (not their 'talking-shop ideas) should be sought by means of some formal and specific questions.
However, here there is a procedural problem. The recent Synods have probably given the impression to some of the sillier and doctrinally weaker bishops that, when their views are sought, they are each being invited to say what they think is most helpful to the Church, or what is God's will for the Church of our own day. That mistake will need to be firmly corrected. We must get back to the first millennium assumption that each bishop speaks, not his own views or clever ideas, his "blue-sky thinking" as people sometimes call it, but what he has received from his predecessors in his see. You know what I mean ... you've all read your S Irenaeus ... parelabon kai paredoka, as S Paul would say.
So their Lordships should be required to provide documentary evidence of what their (say) ten immediate predecessors had taught about the matters in hand.
The then pope - Agatho II, perhaps, might be his name - would embody this (synchronic and diachronic) teaching of the world-wide episcopate in a major dogmatic statement, preferably with each section lucidly summarised by a Si quis dixerit/negaverit .... anathema sit formula.
It would constitute a formal Magisterial statement of what is already the Infallible Ordinary Magisterium.
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3 comments:
.. most Frank way! This time you put a capital
I read this post after the one about people complaining about your titles for Frank
Ho ho ho
I disagree, respectfully, about your proposal for a review of recent episcopal teaching on marriage. I believe we should go back at least to the Council in Trullo, perhaps initially by means of a joint Catholic/Orthodox consultation of theologians. Both Catholic and Orthodox agree on the indissolubility of Sacramental Marriage. But the Orthodox think that the Catholic annullment process is a violation of it, and have devised a different less legalistic approach to the pastoral problems which arise in intimate interpersonal relations.
Just came across this:
Quoting his predecessor Benedict XVI, Francis wrote that there has been a transition since Vatican II from an ecclesiology formed by church law to church law adapted to ecclesiology. It is “necessary that canon law always corresponds to the conciliar ecclesiology.”
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